AGRICULTURAL RELIEF

159

for a constitutional principle.” We were in an expanding era, and
before every family lay the opportunity to go out into a free world of
unlimited opportunity.

Pioneering and freedom have their spiritual rewards that make
poverty and privation not only tolerable, but attractive. To-day
we are in a contracting era and children are born into an owned and
controlled world.

It was in my boyhood that Commodore Vanderbilt made his
famous challenge, “The public be damned.” He did this from behind
a corporation breastworks, created and designed and erected under
permit of this same damned public.

Slowly and reluctantly the people gathered and accepted the
challenge. I saw the Constitution rocked to its foundations as the
interstate commerce law and the antitrust law were forged to insure
popular sovereignty, to establish the fact that the Government of
the people was greater than any power or agency which might be
created under its jurisdiction.

I am not charging sinister motives in all of this growth of indus-
trial power. The conquests of American capitalism constitute one
of the most admirable and wonderful chapters in human history.
But the ability of certain individuals to juggle such wonderful results
from coal and oil and iron or steel, and even from whiskey and
aluminum does not constitute a valid claim to such power over the
life, liberty, and happiness of millions of supposedly sovereign
citizens.

Mere size is not in itself objectionable, but it carries with it
destructive and oppressive possibilities which demand a regulating
power.

Slowly and inevitably, in order to maintain sovereignty over the
social and economic forces created under its protection, Congress
has been forced against its will and the traditions and the desires
of our people to establish a multitude of executive boards not only
for regulation, but also for adjustment and finally assistance.

It is a far hark back from the original interstate commerce law to
the Esch-Cummins law, from the original Federal reserve law to the
McFadden branch banking law, from the original designs of the
Federal Trade Commission to its present functions.

I believe Mr. Kincheloe said that there were 96 of these boards,
which means that there were at least 96 groups in the Nation power-
ful enough to need regulation or demand assistance. Both the groups
and the boards represent organized power which means that there
are at least 192 varieties of forces organized and recognized by this
Government with which the unorganized third of our people, living
on or farms, have to make their adjustments.

You may wish to abolish boards rather than create them, but you
will not do it and the farmers have a right to demand and do demand
that you create one more board for them, as powerful as their need
demands, as helpful to them as they themselves are helpful to our

ation.

We are not asking for a political remedy. Steadily and stealthily
the real power of government has been transferred from the political
to the economic world, and in this supergovernment the farmer has
no vote except throuch vou.