United States -- Politics and government -- 1913-1921; World War, 1914-1918 -- United States
For the farmers of the country we have virtually created commercial
credit, by means of the Federal Reserve Act and the Rural Credits Act.
They now have the standing of other business men in the money market. We
have successfully regulated speculation in "futures" and established
standards in the marketing of grains. By an intelligent Warehouse Act we
have assisted to make the standard crops available as never before both
for systematic marketing and as a security for loans from the banks. We
have greatly added to the work of neighborhood demonstration on the farm
itself of improved methods of cultivation, and, through the intelligent
extension of the functions of the Department of Agriculture, have made
it possible for the farmer to learn systematically where his best
markets are and how to get at them.
The workingmen of America have been given a veritable emancipation, by
the legal recognition of a man's labor as part of his life, and not a
mere marketable commodity; by exempting labor organizations from
processes of the courts which treated their members like fractional
parts of mobs and not like accessible and responsible individuals; by
releasing our seamen from involuntary servitude; by making adequate
provision for compensation for industrial accidents; by providing
suitable machinery for mediation and conciliation in industrial
disputes; and by putting the Federal Department of Labor at the disposal
of the workingman when in search of work.
We have effected the emancipation of the children of the country by
releasing them from hurtful labor. We have instituted a system of
national aid in the building of highroads such as the country has been
feeling after for a century. We have sought to equalize taxation by
means of an equitable income tax. We have taken the steps that ought to
have been taken at the outset to open up the resources of Alaska. We
have provided for national defense upon a scale never before seriously
proposed upon the responsibility of an entire political party. We have
driven the tariff lobby from cover and obliged it to substitute solid
argument for private influence.
This extraordinary recital must sound like a platform, a list of
sanguine promises; but it is not. It is a record of promises made four
years ago and now actually redeemed in constructive legislation.
These things must profoundly disturb the thoughts and confound the plans
of those who have made themselves believe that the Democratic Party
neither understood nor was ready to assist the business of the country
in the great enterprises which it is its evident and inevitable destiny
to undertake and carry through. The breaking up of the lobby must
especially disconcert them: for it was through the lobby that they
sought and were sure they had found the heart of things. The game of
privilege can be played successfully by no other means.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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