Men may differ as to the particular form of governmental activity
with respect to industry and business, but nearly all are agreed
that private enterprise in times such as these cannot be left
without assistance and without reasonable safeguards lest it
destroy not only itself but also our processes of civilization. The
underlying necessity for such activity is indeed as strong now as
it was years ago when Elihu Root said the following very
significant words:

"Instead of the give and take of free individual contract, the
tremendous power of organization has combined great aggregations of
capital in enormous industrial establishments working through vast
agencies of commerce and employing great masses of men in movements
of production and transportation and trade, so great in the mass
that each individual concerned in them is quite helpless by
himself. The relations between the employer and the employed,
between the owners of aggregated capital and the units of organized
labor, between the small producer, the small trader, the consumer,
and the great transporting and manufacturing and distributing
agencies, all present new questions for the solution of which the
old reliance upon the free action of individual wills appears quite
inadequate. And in many directions, the intervention of that
organized control which we call government seems necessary to
produce the same result of justice and right conduct which obtained
through the attrition of individuals before the new conditions
arose."

It was in this spirit thus described by Secretary Root that we
approached our task of reviving private enterprise in March, 1933.
Our first problem was, of course, the banking situation because, as