Page:Other People's Money - Louis Brandeis.djvu/182

 CHAPTER VIII A CURSE OF BIGNESS

Bigness has been an important factor in the rise of the Money Trust: Big railroad systems, Big industrial trusts, Big public service companies; and as instruments of these Big banks and Big trust companies. J. P. Morgan &. Co. (in their letter of defence to the Pujo Committee) urge the needs of Big Business as the justification for financial concentration. They declare that what they euphemistically call "coöperation" is "simply a further result of the necessity for handling great transactions"; that "the country obviously requires not only the larger individual banks, but demands also that those banks shall coöperate to perform efficiently the country's business"; and that "a step backward along this line would mean a halt in industrial progress that would affect every wage-earner from the Atlantic to the Pacific." The phrase "great transactions" is used by the bankers apparently as meaning large corporate security issues. Leading bankers have undoubtedly cooperated during the last 15 years in floating some very