Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/249

 THE CONTROL OF TRUSTS 235

construct more modern and better located mills, and thus decrease the cost of production and increase the output. If this plan is carried out, a stronger corporation and more complete monopoly will be effected than would have resulted from the other proposed combination ; a?id yet not a single clause of the anti-trust laws of any state will be violated in the least. The future of the small competitors, however, is not very bright.

So, then, we find the anti-trust laws, thus far enacted, wholly inadequate to prevent the real thing against which they are directed, however much they may uselessly harass industry. If the monopoly, or huge corporation, is to be gotten rid of, laws and constitutions must be so modified as to strike it directly, instead of trying to reach it through the limitation of contracts and combinations. But the question at once arises : Is the great industry in itself undesirable? Is it the large plant, or the fact of irresponsible power, against which our laws should be directed in the interest of public policy ? More and more, it seems, in spite of the growing popular opposition to trusts, there are com- ing gleams of recognition of the advantages of large, and even monopolistic, industries. Mayor Jones, of Toledo, in a recent communication to the Chicago Record expressed an opinion which is becoming more general when he said there is " neither sense nor reason in the attempts to destroy the labor-saving machines by legislation." Mr. Hewitt's testimony before the Industrial Commission, last April, was to the same effect: " Corporations have continued to grow, and at the present moment they threaten to absorb the entire industrial business of the country which is capable of being administered by centralized management. This is precisely the direction which I anticipated, and seems to me to be in accordance with the evolution which has taken place within the last half century, and which may be in accordance with a natural law, if there be natural laws involved in the pro- gress of modern civilization." The expressions of these two men, occupying in general the opposite extremes of all possible positions, are reflected by an increasing number of newspapers in their more lucid intervals.

For it is becomng apparent that, whatever may prove true