cellar." Now, that's exactly what we want to do,--let the dark out of the
cellar.

* * * * *

Take, first, the relations existing between politics and business.

It is perfectly legitimate, of course, that the business interests of the
country should not only enjoy the protection of the law, but that they
should be in every way furthered and strengthened and facilitated by
legislation. The country has no jealousy of any connection between
business and politics which is a legitimate connection. It is not in the
least averse from open efforts to accommodate law to the material
development which has so strengthened the country in all that it has
undertaken by supplying its extraordinary life with its necessary physical
foundations.

But the illegitimate connections between business and legislation are
another matter. I would wish to speak on this subject with soberness and
circumspection. I have no desire to excite anger against anybody. That
would be easy, but it would do no particular good. I wish, rather, to
consider an unhappy situation in a spirit that may enable us to account
for it, to some extent, and so perhaps get at the causes and the remedy.
Mere denunciation doesn't help much to clear up a matter so involved as is
the complicity of business with evil politics in America.

Every community is vaguely aware that the political machine upon which it
looks askance has certain very definite connections with men who are
engaged in business on a large scale, and the suspicion which attaches to
the machine itself has begun to attach also to business enterprises, just