Of course you understand what all this means; it is an amiable preliminary to the statement which Judge Gary is going to make, that now all these evil things have changed, this wicked time has passed! But I would like to put to Judge Gary the question: how did it happen to pass? Who brought it about, and what were you, Judge Gary, doing at the time? Were you going about the country, telling boys and girls in colleges about the need of business reform? The question answers itself. At that time Judge Gary was head of the Federal Steel Company, and busily engaged in organizing the Steel Trust, the most perfect illustration in America of the evils he refers to. Also he was engaged in denouncing as agitators and disturbers of the public peace the very men, from Theodore Roosevelt down, whose labors on behalf of reform he now pretends to justify and accept. In those wicked days, he tells the students, the masters of industry “did not give to employes just consideration. The wage rates were adjusted strictly in accordance with the laws of supply and demand. The welfare of the workmen was decided almost entirely from the standpoint of utility and profit.” But now, all that is over. “The large majority of business men now conduct their affairs” on the basis “that employes are associates rather than servants, and should be treated accordingly.... Conscientious treatment of employes which secures their respect and confidence will tend to increase their loyalty and efficiency.” And this from the man who continues to maintain throughout the greatest industry in America a twelve-hour day, with a twenty-four-hour day once a week! Who uses all the power of his colossal organization to deny to his employes the most essential of all industrial rights—the right to organize for their own protection! Who, as an incident to this policy, maintains the most widespread and most infamous system of espionage and terrorism that has ever been known in an Anglo-Saxon country! This man, who pays more money to spies and provocateurs in one year than the czar of all the Russians paid in ten—this man, whose hands are slimy with the blood of union organizers shot down in cold blood, whose lips are foul with ten thousand lies, told about his wage-slaves during the last steel strike—this man has the insolence to stand up before a commencement audience at a “Christian” university, and declare that justice and kindness now prevail in American big business, and that wage rates are no longer “adjusted strictly in accordance with the laws of supply and demand!”