. Moreover, where the combination has really been guilty of
misconduct the law serves a useful purpose, and in such cases as those
of the Standard Oil and Tobacco Trusts, if effectively enforced, the law
confers a real and great good.

Suits were brought against the most powerful corporations in the land,
which we were convinced had clearly and beyond question violated the
Anti-Trust Law. These suits were brought with great care, and only where
we felt so sure of our facts that we could be fairly certain that
there was a likelihood of success. As a matter of fact, in most of the
important suits we were successful. It was imperative that these suits
should be brought, and very real good was achieved by bringing them, for
it was only these suits that made the great masters of corporate capital
in America fully realize that they were the servants and not the masters
of the people, that they were subject to the law, and that they would
not be permitted to be a law unto themselves; and the corporations
against which we proceeded had sinned, not merely by being big (which
we did not regard as in itself a sin), but by being guilty of unfair
practices towards their competitors, and by procuring fair advantages
from the railways. But the resulting situation has made it evident that
the Anti-Trust Law is not adequate to meet the situation that has grown
up because of modern business conditions and the accompanying tremendous
increase in the business use of vast quantities of corporate wealth. As
I have said, this was already evident to my mind when I was President,
and in communications to Congress I repeatedly stated the facts. But
when I made these communications there were still plenty of people
who did not believe that we would succeed in the suits that had
been instituted against the Standard Oil, the Tobacco, and other
corporations, and it was impossible to get the public as a whole to
realize what the situation was. Sincere zealots who believed that
all combinations could be destroyed and the old-time conditions of
unregulated competition restored, insincere politicians who knew better
but made believe that they thought whatever their constituents
wished them to think, crafty reactionaries who wished to see on the
statute-books laws which they believed unenforceable, and the almost
solid "Wall Street crowd" or representatives of "big business" who at
that time opposed with equal violence both wise and necessary and unwise