(3) All the methods just mentioned as employed in dealings with customers are likewise unfair toward competitors.  Many other methods are used to the same end, such as:  enticing away their employees, or corrupting and bribing them to act as spies, paying secret commissions, false advertising, misrepresenting competitors, imitating their patterns in goods of defective workmanship, shutting off their credit or their supplies of materials, acquiring stock in competing companies, malicious suits, infringement of patents, intimidation by threats of business injury or of scandalous exposures, operation of bogus independent companies.

Sec. 16. #Growing conception of fair competition.# Any industrial trust that was able to gain domination and monopoly power only by the use of such practices, or any part of them, can hardly be deemed the result of a “natural evolution.”  If “artificial” means the use of artifices surely this development deserves the adjective.  Yet even if not natural, this development may be thought to be “inevitable,” human nature being as it is.  But the bald fact is that while the great trust movement was in progress no effort worthy of the name was being made to enforce even the then existing laws and to oppose this artificial development.  The same allegation of inevitableness was once commonly made of discriminatory railroad rates and rebates, evils which have been in large part remedied only since the period 1903-1906, when at last intelligent action was taken.

To those that came to see the problem in this light, acceptance of industrial monopoly with its complex task of fixing by public commission the prices on innumerable kinds and qualities of goods seemed at least premature.  Rather, the first step toward a solution seemed to be the vigorous prevention of unfair practices, and the next step a positive regularizing of “fair competition."[19] The fundamental idea in this is the enforcement of a common market price (plus freights) at any one time to all the customers of an enterprise.  By this plan potential competition would become actual, and small enterprises that were efficient might compete successfully within their own fields with large enterprises that maintained prices above a true competitive level.  Even general lowering of prices by a large enterprise with evident purpose of killing off smaller competitors is unfair competition under this conception.  It was for years recognized that the realization of this policy required legislation regarding uniform prices and the creation of a commission for the administration of the law.

Sec. 17. #The trust issues in 1912#.  The campaign of 1912 presented in an interesting manner the three policies above outlined.  The Republican party led by President Taft stood for the policy of monopoly-prosecuted; its program was the vigorous enforcement of the Sherman law.  The Progressive party, led by Mr. Roosevelt, stood in the main for the policy of “monopoly-accepted-and-regulated”; its program called for minimizing prosecution and for developing a system of regulation of trust-prices.  The Democratic party, led by Mr. Wilson, stood for the policy of competition-maintained-and-regulated, and the problem was to find means to strengthen and regularize the forces of competition.