"Absolutely free enterprise" was Mr. Wilson's leading phrase. "We design that the limitations on private enterprise shall be removed, so that the next generation of youngsters, as they come along, will not have to become protégés of benevolent trusts, but will be free to go about making their own lives what they will; so that we shall taste again the full cup, not of charity, but of liberty." The restoration of freedom for every person to go into business for himself was the burden of his appeal: "Are you not eager for the time when the genius and initiative of all the people shall be called into the service of business?... when your sons shall be able to look forward to becoming not employees, but heads of some small, it may be, but hopeful business, where their best energies shall be inspired by the knowledge that they are their own masters with the paths of the world before them ... and every avenue of commercial and industrial activity leveled for the feet of all who would tread it?"
Mr. Wilson's economic system seems to be susceptible of the following summary. The great trusts are "unnatural products," not of competition, but of the unwillingness of men to face competition and of unfair practices. Big business is the product of genuine services to the community, and it should be allowed to destroy whom it can by fairly underselling honest goods. The enemy is, therefore, the trust; it is the trust which prevents everybody who would from becoming his own master in some small business; it is the trust that has taken away the "freedom" which we once had in the United States. The remedy is inevitably the dissolution of the trusts, the prohibition of unfair practices in competition--then will follow as night the day that perfect freedom which is as new wine to a sick nation. With competition "restored" and maintained by government prosecution of offenders, no one need have a master unless he chooses.
Mr. Wilson's opponents saw in this simple industrial program nothing more than the old gospel of Adam Smith and Ricardo--the gospel of _laissez faire_ and individualism. They asked him to specify, for example, into how many concerns the Steel Trust should be dissolved in order to permit the man with brains and a few thousand dollars capital to get into the steel business. They asked him to name a catalogue of "unfair practices" which were to be prohibited in order to put competition on a "free and natural" basis. They asked him to state just how, with the present accumulation of great capitals in the hands of a relatively few, the poor but industrious person with small capital could meet the advantages afforded by large capitals. They inquired whether England in the middle of the nineteenth century, with this perfect industrial ideal and free trade besides, presented the picture of utopian liberty which the new freedom promised.