development of this country.  Because no matter how wise these gentlemen may be, no matter how patriotic, no matter how singularly they may be gifted with the power to divine the right courses of business, there isn’t any group of men in the United States or in any other country who are wise enough to have the destinies of a great people put into their hands as trustees.  We mean that business in this land shall be released, emancipated.

VIII

MONOPOLY, OR OPPORTUNITY?

Gentlemen say, they have been saying for a long time, and, therefore, I assume that they believe, that trusts are inevitable.  They don’t say that big business is inevitable.  They don’t say merely that the elaboration of business upon a great co-operative scale is characteristic of our time and has come about by the natural operation of modern civilization.  We would admit that.  But they say that the particular kind of combinations that are now controlling our economic development came into existence naturally and were inevitable; and that, therefore, we have to accept them as unavoidable and administer our development through them.  They take the analogy of the railways.  The railways were clearly inevitable if we were to have transportation, but railways after they are once built stay put.  You can’t transfer a railroad at convenience; and you can’t shut up one part of it and work another part.  It is in the nature of what economists, those tedious persons, call natural monopolies; simply because the whole circumstances of their use are so stiff that you can’t alter them.  Such are the analogies which these gentlemen choose when they discuss the modern trust.

I admit the popularity of the theory that the trusts have come about through the natural development of business conditions in the United States, and that it is a mistake to try to oppose the processes by which they have been built up, because those processes belong to the very nature of business in our time, and that therefore the only thing we can do, and the only thing we ought to attempt to do, is to accept them as inevitable arrangements and make the best out of it that we can by regulation.

I answer, nevertheless, that this attitude rests upon a confusion of thought.  Big business is no doubt to a large extent necessary and natural.  The development of business upon a great scale, upon a great scale of co-operation, is inevitable, and, let me add, is probably desirable.  But that is a very different matter from the development of trusts, because the trusts have not grown.  They have been artificially created; they have been put together, not by natural processes, but by the will, the deliberate planning will, of men who were more powerful than their neighbors in the business world, and who wished to make their power secure against competition.

The trusts do not belong to the period of infant industries.  They are not the products of the time, that old laborious time, when the great continent we live on was undeveloped, the young nation struggling to find itself and get upon its feet amidst older and more experienced competitors.  They belong to a very recent and very sophisticated age, when men knew what they wanted and knew how to get it by the favor of the government.