In the third place, cases are
not unknown in which the special interests, not satisfied with making
the laws, have assumed also to interpret them, through that worst of
evils in the body politic, an unjust judge.
When an interest or an enemy is entrenched in a position rendered
impregnable against an expected mode of attack, there is but one remedy,
to shift the ground and follow lines against which no preparation has
been made. Fortunately for us, the special interests, with a blindness
which naturally follows from their wholly commercialized point of view,
have failed to see the essential fact in this great conflict. They do
not understand that this is far more than an economic question, that in
its essence and in every essential characteristic it is a moral
question.
The present economic order, with its face turned away from equality of
opportunity, involves a bitter moral wrong, which must be corrected for
moral reasons and along moral lines. It must be corrected with justness
and firmness, but not bitterly, for that would be to lower the Nation to
the moral level of the evil which we have set ourselves to fight.
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