Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/647

Rh equal resources, might enter the lists against it; and that, even if adequate competition with it were to arise, the delay incident thereto would be sufficient for intolerable oppression of the people. The case is to be carried to the Court of Appeals, and its fate there will be of national interest. In the courts of Ohio, Illinois, Louisiana, and other States, it has been decided that all combinations to suppress competition, raise prices, or restrain trade, are illegal, and it has been proposed to attack the "trusts" along the line indicated by these decisions.

Should the illegality of "trusts" in general, as now constituted, be maintained in courts of final appeal, the question emerges. How can the benefits of business organization, which the "trust" includes and has introduced, be secured with at the same time avoidance of abuse by a control practically amounting to monopoly? It is highly probable that, if corporations are denied the exercise of the economic and beneficial features of "trusts," firms attracted by the resulting advantages will establish organizations substantially similar. Indeed, individual accumulations of wealth have long since passed the point where they confer power to control single important industries of the United States. Clearly, then, a question of no little difficulty is before the American people. Ordinary competitive business has in many departments become so complex, unwieldy, and wasteful, as imperatively to demand some such simplification as "trust" organization offers. If that organization be denied to groups of capitalists, the powers sought by such organization will in all likelihood, with some delay, be exercised by individuals who will have all the temptation to abuse their strength into which corporations have been led in the past. Law must in the nature of things lag behind exigency, and in this new transition of business, from competition to combination, it evidently has to confront a problem of supreme importance. In the development of the Copper Trust we have seen how an international combination may become a conspiracy to rob the world: a singular piece of testimony to the obliteration of national boundaries by modern methods of locomotion and communication!

For "trusts" limiting their operations to the United States a line of treatment has been suggested which has doubtless had its origin in legal consideration of the railroad question. Since its settlement is stoutly maintained by expert authority to consist in frank acceptance of the "pool" and its legalization, why not, it is asked, also legalize the "trust," surrounding its control with all the safeguards necessary and feasible? The State already exercises a degree of supervision over certain quasi-public businesses—banking, insurance, and railroading. Its supervision may be justly extended to the "trusts," while at the same time the