The people of this country are being very subtly dealt with.  You know, of course, that, unless our Commerce Commissions are absolutely sleepless, you can get rebates without calling them such at all.  The most complicated study I know of is the classification of freight by the railway company.  If I wanted to make a special rate on a special thing, all I should have to do is to put it in a special class in the freight classification, and the trick is done.  And when you reflect that the twenty-four men who control the United States Steel Corporation, for example, are either presidents or vice-presidents or directors in 55 per cent. of the railways of the United States, reckoning by the valuation of those railroads and the amount of their stock and bonds, you know just how close the whole thing is knitted together in our industrial system, and how great the temptation is.  These twenty-four gentlemen administer that corporation as if it belonged to them.  The amazing thing to me is that the people of the United States have not seen that the administration of a great business like that is not a private affair; it is a public affair.

I have been told by a great many men that the idea I have, that by restoring competition you can restore industrial freedom, is based upon a failure to observe the actual happenings of the last decades in this country; because, they say, it is just free competition that has made it possible for the big to crush the little.

I reply, it is not free competition that has done that; it is illicit competition.  It is competition of the kind that the law ought to stop, and can stop,—­this crushing of the little man.

You know, of course, how the little man is crushed by the trusts.  He gets a local market.  The big concerns come in and undersell him in his local market, and that is the only market he has; if he cannot make a profit there, he is killed.  They can make a profit all through the rest of the Union, while they are underselling him in his locality, and recouping themselves by what they can earn elsewhere.  Thus their competitors can be put out of business, one by one, wherever they dare to show a head.  Inasmuch as they rise up only one by one, these big concerns can see to it that new competitors never come into the larger field.  You have to begin somewhere.  You can’t begin in space.  You can’t begin in an airship.  You have got to begin in some community.  Your market has got to be your neighbors first and those who know you there.  But unless you have unlimited capital (which of course you wouldn’t have when you were beginning) or unlimited credit (which these gentlemen can see to it that you shan’t get), they can kill you out in your local market any time they try, on the same basis exactly as that on which they beat organized labor; for they can sell at a loss in your market because they are selling at a profit everywhere else, and they can recoup the losses by which they beat