However it has come about, it is more important still that the control of credit also has become dangerously centralized.  It is the mere truth to say that the financial resources of the country are not at the command of those who do not submit to the direction and domination of small groups of capitalists who wish to keep the economic development of the country under their own eye and guidance.  The great monopoly in this country is the monopoly of big credits.  So long as that exists, our old variety and freedom and individual energy of development are out of the question.  A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit.  Our system of credit is privately concentrated.  The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom.  This is the greatest question of all, and to this statesmen must address themselves with an earnest determination to serve the long future and the true liberties of men.

This money trust, or, as it should be more properly called, this credit trust, of which Congress has begun an investigation, is no myth; it is no imaginary thing.  It is not an ordinary trust like another.  It doesn’t do business every day.  It does business only when there is occasion to do business.  You can sometimes do something large when it isn’t watching, but when it is watching, you can’t do much.  And I have seen men squeezed by it; I have seen men who, as they themselves expressed it, were put “out of business by Wall Street,” because Wall Street found them inconvenient and didn’t want their competition.

Let me say again that I am not impugning the motives of the men in Wall Street.  They may think that that is the best way to create prosperity for the country.  When you have got the market in your hand, does honesty oblige you to turn the palm upside down and empty it?  If you have got the market in your hand and believe that you understand the interest of the country better than anybody else, is it patriotic to let it go?  I can imagine them using this argument to themselves.

The dominating danger in this land is not the existence of great individual combinations,—­that is dangerous enough in all conscience,—­but the combination of the combinations,—­of the railways, the manufacturing enterprises, the great mining projects, the great enterprises for the development of the natural water-powers of the country, threaded together in the personnel of a series of boards of directors into a “community of interest” more formidable than any conceivable single combination that dare appear in the open.