Trusts touching all and having a hold on all, our moneyed class has a great and formidable power; but Trusts are our mere dependencies and owe fealty to the Republican party as great as that of the robber barons to their king.

SENATOR: I think the Trusts resemble rather the brigandise-justiciars of the fourteenth century.

PRESIDENT: Harnessed, Trust is a universal benefactor. SENATOR: Harnessed! Yes. There's the rub.

PRESIDENT: Trust is the subterranean abyss of the Republican party, the center from which its heart-blood flows. Senator, the elements of Trust and Imperialism have driven the party from its constitutional moorings. It is time to take our reckonings. Where are we?

SENATOR: On the road to ruin, drifting anywhere between the tyrants of Lombardy and the Empire of the Neroes, with the Rough Riders of Imperialism in the saddle and Trust in the actual adverse hostile possession of the bulk of America's assets ready for an unconstitutional receivership.

PRESIDENT: Who is on watch?

SENATOR: The Republican party-with its Imperial banner of Glory and Gold floating over a black swarm of political vultures swooping down on our new possessions.

PRESIDENT: When the tumult and the shouting die -what then?

SENATOR: The Constitution, like the submerged peak of a lost world, will emerge from the black waste of waters crimsoned with blood.

PRESIDENT: Senator, if, as you contend, our Republic is treading in the footsteps of the six great European powers, in what respect does the Constitution antagonize their form of government?

SENATOR: The governments of the six great powers stand for the inequality of man. In ours the useful is the

practical aspect of the Just, the Just is the moral aspect of the useful, the illustration, is our equality of man. Man in a monarchy is made for the state. America was made for man.

PRESIDENT: Yes, King John granted the Magna Charta, but neither the King nor the Barons ever dreamed that man existed before the state. The most illustrious of a body of men where all were illustrious, the framers of the Constitution, were the only statesmen from prehistoric times who understood that doctrine. To most people of the constitutional epoch, as to those of to-day, that fundamental concept of freedom was as mixed and muddy a postulate as would be the rule in Shelly's Case to the professional army of our attorney promoters. The profound significance of the doctrine of the rights of man, even as reenforced by the Fourteenth Amendment, is as little comprehended by that large element of vulgarity, the plutocratic syndicates which handle Republican politics, as a Go-It-Fast-Smashem Newport Nouveaux Riches comprehends differential and integral calculus.

SENATOR: Abraham Lincoln gave immortal expression to his hope and fear when he said:

The framers of the Declaration of Independence meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all and revered by all, constantly looked to, constantly labored for, even, though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all.

He foresaw before the lapse of a half century that millions of corporation serfs might claim as their sanctuary the doctrine of political economy, which Jesus Christ first taught, the sacred concept of the equality of man; the equality of man before the state, or, as the Nebraskan puts

it, the man before the dollar, takes in a field too vast for Plutocracy to explore. It proceeds with a mightiness of reason they cannot keep pace with.

In his farewell address Lafayette exclaimed:

May this great monument raised to liberty serve as a lesson to the oppressor and an example to the oppressed!

Lafayette had sounded all the shoals and depths of the inequality of man.

PRESIDENT: Senator, you are more statesman than politician; full of generous and manly flights. You have taught me if the shadow takes the place of substance the country may be left with only shadows.

SENATOR: Mr. President, I am only darkness attempting to illuminate light. I prefer no claim to statesmanship. I elect statesmen. Daniel Webster was a statesman, but he could not elect himself to the Presidency. Unless by turns I play Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde there can be no resurrection of the Republican party. The ablest and best characters in history often fought like gladiators for fame without troubling themselves about justice. To-day the whole fight is over taxation. Your politic mind exhibits the splendor of a luminary reflected at times in muddy, certainly agitated, water. The taxation problem is a correct, clear, and powerful analysis of history. Taxation and the equality of man are extensively co-related subjects. Our blue-blooded Boston patriots of "76 first challenged to the outrance the doctrine of the inequality of man, a Colossus weightier than the universe. The state was created for man, not man for the state.

SENATOR: Yes, Boston's attitude was a pitch of intrepid defiance. Have you read the Nebraskan's great speech?

PRESIDENT: Yes. It reminds me of what Rufus Choate

said of John Adams as a debater: "He has an instinct for the jugular and carotid artery as unerring as that of any carnivorous animal."

SENATOR: Mr. President, he rivals the highest eloquence of any age or century. His conceptions are sudden, original, brilliant, arbitrary, tumultuous, infinitely versatile. His speech yesterday resembled a great mountain torrent, a large measure of clear, powerful, and brilliant eloquence. It is an eloquence most eminently distinguished by an intelligence comprehensive, sagacious, and incomparably active. That intelligence has such a velocity, vividness, and keenness of action that the reader's imagination is continually haunted with the similes of lightning. The fine passages do not, in the Ciceronian manner, regularly swell and expand into magnificence. Instead of this the mind emits itself in powerful impulses and flashes which strike and instantly vanish. Propositions the most abstracted and metaphors the most splendid and original are uttered with an almost unequaled brevity. This orator was assuredly never surpassed in the power of putting the whole essence of an argument, the main rationale of a subject, in the concentrated form of a single thought or image. There is also a great moral force in his eloquence, from the infallible signs of sincerity which constantly distinguish it, and from a certain lofty character of austerity. Undoubtedly the Nebraskan's speeches will be counted among the achievements of the human mind. They remind me of Dante's phrase, "Truth deep as the center."

SENATOR: Good-night, Mr. President. My visit, I fear, has proved a visitation.

PRESIDENT: Senator, I am more grateful for it than words can express. You have relieved the pangs and gripes of a boiling conscience. My mind is now unburdened; my suffering was great. I was thinking of joining the Suicide

Club, but I am off with flying colors, thanks to you. Henceforth the Republican party has one law, one tongue, one faith. Senator Hanna can "organize victory" by hypocrisy and dissimulation. Shall we have a revolution which is a transfer of power to Trusts or a constitutional reform which is a correction of abuses? It looks as if the Nebraskan and the people had determined in vain with Lincoln that "this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." SENATOR: Do not give up the ship, Mr. President. On the day the Republic returns we shall not be here.

PRESIDENT: Arrange for an early meeting. Invite the National Committee to listen to our discussion. We can thus quickly acquaint it with the grave exigencies which confront the party.

SENATOR: That would set America in a blaze. The Nebraskan, like a huge bloodhound, is roaring and panting upon our path. If we are to inaugurate Imperial government we dare not educate the people. The National Committee must follow the dead line of the silent page of orders or lose their offices. Remember "Educate the people" was the unceasing exhortation of Jefferson. "Educate the people" was the dying legacy which Washington bequeathed to the nation he had saved.

PRESIDENT: Before they go to trial grave lawyers strive to get at the other side of their client's case. We know that the fall of every state may be traced to the economic disorders produced by the inequitable distribution of its wealth. It may be likened to the decrepitude which old age has produced.

SENATOR: Yes, but do the laywers tell the other side of the case to the judge, jury, witnesses, and the reporters? I shall present to the President, the client of the Re