Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/85

Rh hoary with age, and has been constantly repeated year after year. Of course, this was before the brilliant discovery was made that low prices are un-American. How has the promise been kept?

Just as after the close of the war, when the internal taxes had disappeared, the manufacturers would not let go their compensation in tariff duties, so many of the most potent and important protected industries, when it was time for home competition to show the promised beneficent effect, coolly proceeded to form “trusts,” combinations, agreements, understandings among themselves, for the purpose of controlling and, if necessary, of limiting production and of maintaining or even raising prices. In this way, they succeeded in many cases in establishing virtual monopolies.

After foreign competition had been in a great measure excluded by law for their benefit, they proceeded themselves to strangle home competition, too, also for their own benefit.

If there is anything hateful to the American mind, it is the idea of a monopoly. The protectionists began to fear that the open appearance of the “trust,” which in fact is only the protective idea carried to its logical extreme, would excite the popular mind against the protective system. Nothing, indeed, suggests itself more naturally to the simplest understanding than this: when a branch of industry is protected against foreign competition by tariff duties, and a combination is formed for the purpose of killing home competition, too, and thus to control prices, the natural remedy is to let in foreign competition by removing the tariff duties and thus breaking up the monopoly.

This is so clear that the protectionists feared that the people would jump to the conclusion. Then laws were devised declaring the organization of trusts unlawful and