capital had been the leading feature in American
industrial development during the last two decades of the nineteenth
century. In the conquest of business by trusts and "the resulting
private fortunes of great magnitude," the Populists and the Democrats
had seen a grievous danger to the republic. "Plutocracy has taken the
place of democracy; the tariff breeds trusts; let us destroy therefore
the tariff and the trusts"--such was the battle cry which had been taken
up by Bryan and his followers.

President Roosevelt countered vigorously. He rejected the idea that the
trusts were the product of the tariff or of governmental action of any
kind. He insisted that they were the outcome of "natural economic
forces": (1) destructive competition among business men compelling them
to avoid ruin by cooeperation in fixing prices; (2) the growth of markets
on a national scale and even international scale calling for vast
accumulations of capital to carry on such business; (3) the possibility
of immense savings by the union of many plants under one management. In
the corporation he saw a new stage in the development of American
industry. Unregulated competition he regarded as "the source of evils
which all men concede must be remedied if this civilization of ours is
to survive." The notion, therefore, that these immense business concerns
should be or could be broken up by a decree of law, Roosevelt considered
absurd.

At the same time he proposed that "evil trusts" should be prevented from
"wrong-doing of any kind"; that is, punished for plain swindling, for
making agreements to limit output, for refusing to sell to customers who
dealt with rival firms, and for conspiracies with railways to ruin
competitors by charging high freight rates and for similar abuses.
Accordingly, he proposed, not the destruction of the trusts, but their
regulation by the government. This, he contended, would preserve the
advantages of business on a national scale while preventing the evils
that accompanied it. The railway company he declared to be a public
servant. "Its rates should be just to and open to all shippers alike."
So he answered those who thought that trusts and railway combinations
were private concerns to be managed solely by their owners without let
or hindrance and also those who thought trusts and railway combinations
could be abolished by tariff reduction or criminal prosecution.

=The Labor Question.=--On the labor question, then pressi