It has been a misfortune that the National laws on this subject have hitherto been of a negative or prohibitive rather than an affirmative kind, and still more that they have in part sought to prohibit what could not be effectively prohibited, and have in part in their prohibitions confounded what should be allowed and what should not be allowed.  It is generally useless to try to prohibit all restraint on competition, whether this restraint be reasonable or unreasonable; and where it is not useless it is generally hurtful.  Events have shown that it is not possible adequately to secure the enforcement of any law of this kind by incessant appeal to the courts.  The Department of Justice has for the last four years devoted more attention to the enforcement of the anti-trust legislation than to anything else.  Much has been accomplished, particularly marked has been the moral effect of the prosecutions; but it is increasingly evident that there will be a very insufficient beneficial result in the way of economic change.  The successful prosecution of one device to evade the law immediately develops another device to accomplish the same purpose.  What is needed is not sweeping prohibition of every arrangement, good or bad, which may tend to restrict competition, but such adequate supervision and regulation as will prevent any restriction of competition from being to the detriment of the public—­as well as such supervision and regulation as will prevent other abuses in no way connected with restriction of competition.  Of these abuses, perhaps the chief, although by no means the only one, is overcapitalization—­generally itself the result of dishonest promotion—­because of the myriad evils it brings in its train; for such overcapitalization often means an inflation that invites business panic; it always conceals the true relation of the profit earned to the capital actually invested, and it creates a burden of interest payments which is a fertile cause of improper reduction in or limitation of wages; it damages the small investor, discourages thrift, and encourages gambling and speculation; while perhaps worst of all is the trickiness and dishonesty which it implies—­for harm to morals is worse than any possible harm to material interests, and the debauchery of politics and business by great dishonest corporations is far worse than any actual material evil they do the public.  Until the National Government obtains, in some manner which the wisdom of the Congress may suggest, proper control over the big corporations engaged in interstate commerce—­that is, over the great majority of the big corporations—­it will be impossible to deal adequately with these evils.