The quote in question is a typical screw-job by a conspiracy theorist without conscience. Probably originated in the '30s or so. The head of the bipartisan National Monetary Commission was financial expert and Senate Republican leader Nelson Aldrich. Aldrich set up two commissions – one to study the American monetary system in depth and the other, headed by Aldrich himself, to study the European central banking systems and report on them. Aldrich went to Europe opposed to centralized banking, but after viewing *Germany's monetary system* he came away believing that a centralized bank was better than the government-issued bond system that he had previously supported.

John M. Cooper, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, and the author of several books on Woodrow Wilson, has written: “I can tell you categorically that this is not a statement of regret for having created the Federal Reserve. Wilson never had any regrets for having done that. It was an accomplishment in which he took great pride.”

One of Wilson's main concerns about the banking system at that time was that without access to credit (restricted to the "big boys" with private banking access), the vast majority of people would be forced into employment at a corporation rather than in self-employment (so to speak) which characterized our national history to that point.

Two separate portions of the quote appear in The New Freedom: A Call for the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People,” published in 1913.

“The New Freedom” is a distillation of campaign speeches Wilson made while running for President in 1911.

On page 185 there is the following section:
A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom.

And on page 201:
We are at the parting of the ways. We have, not one or two or three, but many, established and formidable monopolies in the United States. We have, not one or two, but many, fields of endeavor into which it is difficult, if not impossible, for the independent man to enter. We have restricted credit, we have restricted opportunity, we have controlled development, and we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world — no longer a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.