officers; who, if they can, will buy up the bar and the bench to protect them from the exposures and punishments they deserve; who try, and sometimes quite successfully too, by an unscrupulous use of their power, to terrorize the whole business community into compliance, if not complicity, with their misdoings, and who then, posing as models of virtue and high respectability, call this “business.” These are the most dangerous pests of society in our days, and they should be duly unmasked and pilloried as such.
TO EDWARD ATKINSON
Your letter was a most agreeable surprise to me after so long a time of suspended communication. More agreeable than all else is the assurance it gives me that you are steadily at work and like it. I too am regularly active, writing my memoirs, but I am not sure that I like work as much as I did in younger years. Still I keep at it and have to be satisfied with that.
I do not know whether “the tide has turned on protectionism.” That there is a widespread desire for the reduction of tariff rates, is undoubtedly true. That this desire is likely to increase in strength is also true. But it will have to grow much stronger if it is to break the dominant power of protectionism in the Republican party or the adherence of the masses to that party. Roosevelt might have done, and might still do, much toward that end, if he had the moral courage to take the protection bull by the horns. But that courage, it seems, he does not possess. There are two things he has, I believe, really at heart: to build up a very strong Navy, and to keep the power of the Republican party intact. To these two objects, I apprehend, he is inclined to sacrifice everything
