combinations.  Modern industrial conditions are such that combination is not only necessary but inevitable.  It is so in the world of business just as it is so in the world of labor, and it is as idle to desire to put an end to all corporations, to all big combinations of capital, as to desire to put an end to combinations of labor.  Corporation and labor union alike have come to stay.  Each if properly managed is a source of good and not evil.  Whenever in either there is evil, it should be promptly held to account; but it should receive hearty encouragement so long as it is properly managed.  It is profoundly immoral to put or keep on the statute books a law, nominally in the interest of public morality that really puts a premium upon public immorality, by undertaking to forbid honest men from doing what must be done under modern business conditions, so that the law itself provides that its own infraction must be the condition precedent upon business success.  To aim at the accomplishment of too much usually means the accomplishment of too little, and often the doing of positive damage.  In my Message to the Congress a year ago, in speaking of the antitrust laws, I said: 

“The actual working of our laws has shown that the effort to prohibit all combination, good or bad, is noxious where it is not ineffective.  Combination of capital, like combination of labor, is a necessary element in our present industrial system.  It is not possible completely to prevent it; and if it were possible, such complete prevention would do damage to the body politic.  What we need is not vainly to try to prevent all combination, but to secure such rigorous and adequate control and supervision of the combinations as to prevent their injuring the public, or existing in such forms as inevitably to threaten injury.  It is unfortunate that our present laws should forbid all combinations instead of sharply discriminating between those combinations which do evil.  Often railroads would like to combine for the purpose of preventing a big shipper from maintaining improper advantages at the expense of small shippers and of the general public.  Such a combination, instead of being forbidden by law, should be favored.  It is a public evil to have on the statute books a law incapable of full enforcement, because both judges and juries realize that its full enforcement would destroy the business of the country; for the result is to make decent men violators of the law against their will, and to put a premium on the behavior of the willful wrongdoers.  Such a result in turn tends to throw the decent man and the willful wrongdoer into close association, and in the end to drag down the former to the latter’s level; for the man who becomes a lawbreaker in one way unhappily tends to lose all respect for law and to be willing to break it in many ways.  No more scathing condemnation could be visited upon a law than is contained in the words of the Interstate Commerce Commission when,