President Roosevelt delivered a striking speech at Washington last Saturday
on the occasion of the opening of the new offices for Congressional Committees. The President took as his text Bunyan's description of the Man with the Muckrake, which he held to be typical of men devoid of high ideals with their eyes fixed only on what was vile. While admitting the gravity of the evils which beset the body politic, he vigorously denounced as a national danger the prac- tice of indiscriminate attacks on the character of public men. The enormous fortunes of to-day, whether individual or corporate, must be grappled with, and he expressed his belief that it would become necessary to adopt a national scheme of a progressive tax in order to limit the amount of inherited fortunes. He also advocated a system of national supervision of inter-State corporations to cope with the evils of over- capitalisation, and declared that the rich class could not check the movement for Governmental regulation of their business in the interest of the public. But the welfare of the wage- earners and farmers was not to be achieved by the pulling down of others, and the success of those who agitated against the entire existing order of things would ultimately provoke the excesses which accompanied all reform brought about through convulsion. We deal with the lessons of the President's speech elsewhere, but may remark here that the presence of several Members of the Senate, with whom the President has of late been frequently in conflict, and who have been attacked in the manner deprecated by the President, lent a dramatic significance to his remarks.
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