The Mellon tax revision legislation provides great reductions in taxes to those who can best afford to pay taxes and causes the masses of the people to pay a greater proportion of the whole tax to be collected than was the case under the old bill... Favors have been granted by Congress to the railroads, the bankers, and great industries time and again. Congress considers what it has done for them 'good business'; but when the same measure of aid is asked for the farmer, it immediately becomes paternalism and class legislation.

That government must respond to the wishes and interests of the masses of its people. That there is need for world leadership and example. That back of any successful war - outlawry program there must be the motive looking to the well being of the people of every country instead of the motive to perpetuate the status quo.

That in nearly every war it is the people who bear the burdens and that it is not the people who cause wars bringing them no advantage, but that they are caused by fear and jealousy coupled with the purpose of men and interests who expect to profit by them.

And finally, that more than we need any set-up of world machinery to judge and determine controversies, we need an abandonment of those causes which seek world control of money, of credit, and of trade, not in the name of a great people but in the name of selfish individuals and interests.

The greatest trouble with us, with Congress, with the Government, is that we fear new thoughts; we dread to depart from the beaten path; we withhold our support of things which are new and a departure from old ways. It is my hope that the next six months will have the effect of impressing upon Congress and the President the importance of accepting drastic means and new ways of righting wrongs of long standing.

In my first weeks in Washington, a corner of the rug was lifted on Communist infiltration into the New Deal. The disclosure came with a mysterious one-line that the legal staff of the AAA was being reorganized... The next day the list of enforced partings included Alger Hiss, then known as one of the zealots of planned economy. My story bluntly branded him as a Red, one spawned in the Harvard classrooms of Felix Frankfurter...

The firing of Hiss from the AAA didn't check his career the slightest. He was able to get a job with the staff of a Senate committee, headed by Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, which was engaged in an inquiry into the activities of 'merchants of death', as those profiting from the sale and distribution of arms came to be known. Naturally communists favored the inquiry, supporting anything that would brand capitalists as warmongers. It wasn't long before rumours of Hiss's alleged communist connections reached Nye. He summoned Hiss to his office, as he told me, and said that he was satisfied with the lawyer's work, but wouldn't stand for any Communist connections.

Hiss looked Nye in the eye and solemnly swore he was no communist, but offered to resign in order to spare Nye, the committee and the investigation possible embarrassment. Nye said he would not sacrifice an innocent man and persuaded Hiss to remain.

Nye's young, he has inexhaustible energy, and he has courage. Those are all important assets. He may be rash in his judgments at times, but it's the rashness of enthusiasm. I think he would do a first-class job with an investigation. Besides, Nye doesn't come up for election again for another four years; by that time the investigation would be over. If it reveals what I am certain it will, such an investigation would help him politically, not harm him. And that would not be the case with many senators. For you see, there isn't a major industry in North Dakota closely allied to the munitions business.

Investigations serve a most healthy purpose in that they prevent many practices and serve as a caution against practices which might be considered proper and customary but for the development of a conscience by the existence of an investigating committee.

With economic and political influence coming into such concentrated control it is of greatest importance that legislative bodies be on closest guard against encroachment which further threatens a free government. Honest investigations, prosecuted by legislators determined to reach and develop the facts, and by legislators who in their work can and will abandon partisanship, are of greatest value to the government and its people. They afford necessary knowledge basic to helpful legislation. They educate people to practices unfriendly to their best interests. They throw fear into men an interests who would by any means at their command move governments to selfish purposes.

It would not be fair to say that the House of Morgan took us to war to save their investment in the Allies, but the record of facts makes it altogether fair to say that these bankers were in the heart and center of a system that made our going to war inevitable. We started in 1914 with a neutrality policy which permitted the sale of arms and munitions to belligerents, but which forbad loans to belligerents. Then, in the name of our own business welfare. President Wilson permitted the policy to be stretched to the extent of permitting the house of Morgan to supply the credit needs of the Allies. After this error of neutrality, the road to war was paved and greased for us.

Almost without exception, the American munitions companies investigated have at times resorted to such unusual approaches, questionable favors and commissions, and methods of 'doing the needful' as to constitute, in effect,

a form of bribery of foreign governmental officials or of their close friends in order to secure business. These business methods carried within themselves the seeds of disturbance to the peace and stability of those nations in which they take place.

While the evidence before this committee does not show that wars have been started solely because of the activities of munitions makers and their agents, it is also true that wars rarely have one single cause, and the committee finds it to be against the peace of the world for selfishly interested organizations to be left free to goad and frighten nations into military activity.

The Committee wishes to point out most definitely that its study of events resulting from the then existing neutrality legislation, or the lack of it, is in no way a criticism, direct or implied, of the sincere devotion of the then President, Woodrow Wilson, to the high causes of peace and democracy. Like other leaders in government, business and finance, he had watched the growth of militarism in the pre-war years. Militarism meant the alliance of the military with powerful economic groups to secure appropriations on the one hand for a constantly increasing military and naval establishment, and on the other hand, the constant threat of the use of that swollen military establishment in behalf of the economic interests at home and abroad of the industrialists supporting it. President Wilson was personally impelled by the highest motives and the most profound convictions as to the justice of the cause of our country and was devoted to peace. He was caught up in a situation created largely by the profit-making interests in the United States, and such interests spread to nearly everybody in the country. It seemed necessary to the prosperity of our people that their markets in Europe remain unimpaired. President Wilson, himself, stated that he realized that the economic rivalries of European nations had played their part in bringing on the war in 1914.

Loans extended to the Allies in 1915 and 1916, led to a very considerable war boom and inflation. This boom extended beyond munitions to auxiliary supplies and equipment as well as to agricultural products. The nature of such a war-boom inflation is that, like all inflations, an administration is almost powerless to check it, once the movement is well started. Our foreign policy then is seriously affected by it, even to the extent of making impossible the alteration of our foreign policy in such a way as to protect our neutral rights.

No member of the Munitions Committee to my knowledge has ever contended that it was munitions makers who took us to war. But that committee and its members have said again and again, that it was war trade and the war boom, shared in by many more than munitions makers, that played the primary part in moving the United States into a war.

England and France reason to believe that if they would declare war on Germany, help would be forthcoming. Some day history will show, as one of the blackest marks of our time, that we sold out, by deliberate falsification, the two European nations with which we had the closest ties. We sent France to her death and have brought England perilously close to it. Had they stalled Hitler for a while, while they prepared to meet him, the story might have been different.

The one thing an American can want to do - win the war and win it with the greatest possible dispatch and decisiveness. It is not time to quibble over what might have been done or how we got where we are. We know only that the enemy chose to make war against us. To give our Commander in Chief unqualified and unprejudicial backing in his prosecution of the war is an obligation which I shall gladly fulfill. Differences over matters of foreign policy up to this hour are abandoned and unity should be accorded in every particular.

If the Government had followed the policy we advocated, war could have been avoided and America and the world would have benefited. Your contribution was immense. Without your tireless energy and your wonderful courage, such a great fight could not have been made. I often marvelled at your stamina and the way in which you carried on night after night, meeting after meeting. Your rallies were political phenomena. It will be a long time before this country sees such crowds or such genuine enthusiasm.

The task before us is tremendous. We do not properly meet the challenge by raking through words of what might have been. I opposed the Roosevelt administration of foreign policy step by step because I believed it was leading us to war. I believed then, and I still believe, that the alternative policy which I and many others advocated was sounder and that it would have kept us out of this war. That alternate policy was in no sense or degree a policy of non-defense, however much some sources may try to confuse the question of non-intervention with the question of defense. But all of that need not now concern us. At war as we are, so far as I am concerned, there will be support of every measure and every purpose advanced which has as its purpose the successful prosecution of our great cause in the winning of the war.

If we can not isolate ourselves from these experiences of war, then at least we might try, with the hope of preventing them, cooperative undertakings with the rest of the world, but undertakings, mind you, that do not create some super-govemment that shall dictate our own destiny, undertakings that will not jeopardize our own sovereignty as a nation, undertakings of a purely cooperative nature that will not challenge our identity or our sovereignty any more than does cooperation with our allies in winning the war.

To me a just and honorable peace is one that will go further than merely to punish the leaders who have been responsible for the catastrophe that is upon the world. To me, a just and honorable peace means one that will -

Undertake seriously the elimination of the factors making for war;

Afford liberation and sovereignty to all the peoples of the world wanting it;

Deny to the victors the acquisition of any territory without the consent of the people of the proposed newly acquired territory;

Give every nation equal access to commercial lanes and ports;

Withhold aid and encouragement from imperialistic and world domination ambitions;

Deny undertakings to preserve unpopular monarchies or their reign over others;

Restore and maintain the identity and sovereignty of lands like Finland, Poland, Norway, and Sweden, unless the peoples of those lands find an association or a partitioning to their own liking;

Refrain from undertaking to force a race of people to live forever under foreign masters.

Deny extraterritorial rights for any power in other lands unwilling voluntarily to grant such rights.

Refrain from subjecting any people or their resources to the profit or advantage of any other power."

First, it showed that economic interests do lie at the bottom of modem war. Second, our inquiry also discovered that economic interests which stand to make money out of war cannot be trusted not to work for war. I do not say, mark you, that they always do, but I do say that they cannot be trusted not to. The third fact follows, namely, that the private armament industry stands at the top of the list of those which, because they stand to make money out of the arming of nations for war, cannot be trusted to work against the coming of war. The fourth fact brought out by our inquiry is that any portion of the banking industry which is engaged in financing the armament industry is just about as dangerous to peace, as the armament industry itself.