Sneers greeted his attempts to
prevent poisons being sold as medicine, and laudanum being peddled
to little children as soothing-syrup. His fight to prevent greedy
folk from destroying the forests, wasting the minerals, and
spoiling the water supplies of America had to be made in the face
of every sort of legal trickery and the meanest of personal abuse.
The Republican Party had been founded during one of the greatest
efforts for human freedom ever made in our history. In its long
years in power, and in the amazing increase in prosperity and
wealth in America, if had become the defender of wealth. Many of
its highest and most powerful men could see no farther than the
cash drawer. Human rights and wrongs, human suffering, or any
attempt to prevent such sufferings, simply did not interest them.
They were not cruel men personally, but they had heard repeated
for so many years that this or the other thing could not be done
"because it would hurt business," that they had come to worship
"business" as a savage bows his head before an idol. Many of them
could give money for an orphan asylum or a children's hospital,
and yet on the same day, vote to kill a bill aimed to prevent
child-labor. To pass such a bill as that would "hurt business."
The Democratic Party was no better. It was simply weaker, and
usually less intelligent. Wherever it was powerful, it, too, was
apt to be the servant of corruption.
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