Page:The Republican Party (1920).djvu/116

 commerce of the world and in whatever international intercourse is calculated to advance the humane welfare of mankind; to lend the weight of our example and participation to the practice of arbitration and international adjudication, and to the supremacy of law and justice and peace among the nations; but to withhold this nation scrupulously from all wanton meddling with the affairs of other nations and from all “entangling alliances” which might compromise our own independence or impair our impartial standing.

As the nation grows, business grows. A hundred years ago the supplanting of cottage workshops with large manufactories revolutionized the industrial world. In our own day a similar revolution has been wrought in the mercantile world by the replacing of a multitude of small individual establishments with a few very large ones, and the replacing of shops devoted to a single class or a few classes of goods with vast emporiums dealing in all classes. Similar combinations have been made in manufacturing enterprises and in public utilities. During the Civil War a dozen or a score of separate telegraph systems, each confined to a constricted region, were merged into a single system covering the whole country. Likewise a number of independent railroads have now and then been united into a single system or a continuous trunk line.

In such combinations there is obviously great