Beginning about the year 1900 one state after another enlarged the powers of its state railroad commission or created a new corporation commission to regulate these “local” or “public utilities."[17] They have accomplished much, but the development of this kind of regulation has not proceeded in many cases beyond the adjustment of relative rates and the abolition of discrimination among the different individuals and classes of customers.  Experience has shown the great difficulty of determining what is a fair absolute level of charges.  A new science of accounting has been developing to assist in the solution of a problem, the complexity of which transcends the agencies at hand to deal with it.  With this policy applied to the local utility (and railroad) phase of monopoly, there remains still the problem of the industrial trusts in the manufacturing enterprises.

Sec. 13. #The industrial trust,—­a natural evolution?# The policy that one is inclined to favor regarding industrial trusts depends very much on one’s answer to the question:  Are or are not industrial trusts natural growths?  In this bare form the question is somewhat vague, but the thought of those who answer it in the affirmative is positive if not always entirely clear.  They (at least the extreme representatives of this view) declare that trusts have been, are, and will continue to be, the results of a “natural evolution” of business conditions, as inevitable as the great changes in the physical world.  If this is so man and society must recognize the facts, must waste no efforts vainly in fighting against fate, but should accept the trusts and realize their possibilities for good.  And these are declared to be great, for it is assumed that without the trusts all of the economies of large production must be sacrificed.  Irresistible economic forces, it is said, are creating larger and larger units of business; friendly cooeperation and unified action must take the place of competition in business.

The outcome must be monopoly in every important line of manufacturing industry and perhaps of commerce.  In view of public opinion toward monopoly, its acceptance necessitates its regulation.  This argument is supported by appeal to the experience in the field of railroads and other local utilities, where public opinion has, after long hesitation, recognized competition to be impracticable and the acceptance of monopoly as inevitable.  As extremes often meet, the view of the industrial trust as a natural evolution is most favored on the one hand by men of “big business,” already interested financially in trusts, and on the other hand by the most radical communists (or socialists) whose ideal is the complete monopolization of industry under the government.