you by the profits which they make in fields where they have beaten other fellows and put them out.  If ever a competitor who by good luck has plenty of money does break into the wider market, then the trust has to buy him out, paying three or four times what the business is worth.  Following such a purchase it has got to pay the interest on the price it has paid for the business, and it has got to tax the whole people of the United States, in order to pay the interest on what it borrowed to do that, or on the stocks and bonds it issued to do it with.  Therefore the big trusts, the big combinations, are the most wasteful, the most uneconomical, and, after they pass a certain size, the most inefficient, way of conducting the industries of this country.

A notable example is the way in which Mr. Carnegie was bought out of the steel business.  Mr. Carnegie could build better mills and make better steel rails and make them cheaper than anybody else connected with what afterward became the United States Steel Corporation.  They didn’t dare leave him outside.  He had so much more brains in finding out the best processes; he had so much more shrewdness in surrounding himself with the most successful assistants; he knew so well when a young man who came into his employ was fit for promotion and was ripe to put at the head of some branch of his business and was sure to make good, that he could undersell every mother’s son of them in the market for steel rails.  And they bought him out at a price that amounted to three or four times,—­I believe actually five times,—­the estimated value of his properties and of his business, because they couldn’t beat him in competition.  And then in what they charged afterward for their product,—­the product of his mills included,—­they made us pay the interest on the four or five times the difference.

That is the difference between a big business and a trust.  A trust is an arrangement to get rid of competition, and a big business is a business that has survived competition by conquering in the field of intelligence and economy.  A trust does not bring efficiency to the aid of business; it buys efficiency out of business.  I am for big business, and I am against the trusts.  Any man who can survive by his brains, any man who can put the others out of the business by making the thing cheaper to the consumer at the same time that he is increasing its intrinsic value and quality, I take off my hat to, and I say:  “You are the man who can build up the United States, and I wish there were more of you.”

There will not be more, unless we find a way to prevent monopoly.  You know perfectly well that a trust business staggering under a capitalization many times too big is not a business that can afford to admit competitors into the field; because the minute an economical business, a business with its capital down to hard pan, with every ounce of its capital working, comes into the field against such an overloaded corporation, it will inevitably beat it and undersell it; therefore it is to the interest of these gentlemen that monopoly be maintained.  They cannot rule the markets of the world in any way but by monopoly.  It is not surprising to find them helping to found a new party with a fine program of benevolence, but also with a tolerant acceptance of monopoly.