and their processes call in question nothing less than the possibility
of free self-government under the forms of a democratic republic.

For now I come to the particular point which I desire to bring forward
against all the denunciations and complainings about the power of
chartered corporations and aggregated capital. If charters have been
given which confer undue powers, who gave them? Our legislators did.
Who elected these legislators. We did. If we are a free, self-governing
people, we must understand that it costs vigilance and exertion to be
self-governing. It costs far more vigilance and exertion to be so under
the democratic form, where we have no aids from tradition or prestige,
than under other forms. If we are a free, self-governing people, we can
blame nobody but ourselves for our misfortunes. No one will come to
help us out of them. It will do no good to heap law upon law, or to try
by constitutional provisions simply to abstain from the use of powers
which we find we always abuse. How can we get bad legislators to pass a
law which shall hinder bad legislators from passing a bad law? That is
what we are trying to do by many of our proposed remedies. The task
before us, however, is one which calls for fresh reserves of moral
force and political virtue from the very foundations of the social
body. Surely it is not a new thing to us to learn that men are greedy
and covetous, and that they will be selfish and tyrannical if they
dare. The plutocrats are simply trying to do what the generals, nobles,
and priests have done in the past--get the power of the State into
their hands, so as to bend the rights of others to their own advantage;
and what we need to do is to recognize the fact that we are face to
face with the same old foes--the vices and passions of human nature.
One of the oldest and most mischievous fallacies in this country has
been the notion that we are better than other nations, and that
Government has a smaller and easier task here than elsewhere. This