The loud-mouthed upholder of popular rights who attacks wickedness only when it is allied with wealth, and who never publicly assails any misdeed, no… - Theodore Roosevelt

Inasmuch as it is so often impossible to punish wrongs done in the past, and to prevent the consequences of the wrongs thus committed being felt by one innocent class, without shifting the burden to the shoulders of another innocent class, we ought to provide that hereafter business shall be carried on from its inception in such a way as to prevent swindling. Incidentally, this will also tend to prevent that excessive profit by one man, which may not be swindling, under existing laws, but which nevertheless is against the interest of the commonwealth. To know all the facts is of as much interest to the investor and the wage-worker as to the shipper, the producer, the consumer. Full knowledge of the past helps us in dealing with the future. If we find that high rates are due to overcapitalization in the past, or to any kind of sharp practice in the past, then, whether or not it is possible to take action which will partly remedy the wrong, we are certainly in a better position to prevent a repetition of the wrong.

I put myself in the way of things happening, and they happened.

In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next. At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freeman to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth. That is nothing new. All I ask in civil life is what you fought for in the Civil War.