In his first message to Congress, on December 3, 1901, Mr. Roosevelt gave considerable attention to trusts and collateral economic problems. He refused to concede the oft-repeated claim that great fortunes were the product of special legal privileges. "The creation of these great corporate fortunes," he said, "has not been due to the tariff nor to any other governmental action, but to natural causes in the business world, operating in other countries as they operate in our own. The process has aroused much antagonism, a great part of which is wholly without warrant. It is not true that as the rich have grown richer, the poor have grown poorer. On the contrary, never before has the average man, the wage worker, the farmer, the small trader, been so well off as in this country at the present time. There have been abuses connected with the accumulation of wealth; yet it remains true that a fortune accumulated in legitimate business can be accumulated by the person specially benefitted only on condition of conferring immense incidental benefits upon others." While thus contending that large fortunes in the main were the product of "natural economic forces," Mr. Roosevelt admitted that some grave evils had arisen in connection with combinations and trusts, and foreshadowed in his proposed remedial legislation the policy of regulation and new nationalism. "When the Constitution was adopted, at the end of the eighteenth century, no human wisdom could foretell the sweeping changes, alike in industrial and political conditions, which were to take place by the beginning of the twentieth century. At that time it was accepted as a matter of course that the several states were the proper authorities to regulate ... the comparatively insignificant and strictly localized corporate bodies of the day. The conditions are now wholly different, and a wholly different action is called for." The remedy he proposed was publicity for corporate affairs, the regulation, not the prohibition, of great combinations, the elimination of specific abuses such as overcapitalization, and government supervision. If the powers of Congress, under the Constitution, were inadequate, then a constitutional amendment should be submitted conferring the proper power. The Interstate Commerce Act should likewise be amended. "The railway is a public servant. Its rates should be just to and open to all shippers alike. The Government should see to it that within its jurisdiction this is so." Conservation of natural resources, irrigation plans, the creation of a department of Commerce and Labor, army and navy reform, and the construction of the Panama Canal were also recommended at the same time (1901).