hostile to the
interests of the people, had left both the nation and the several
States well-nigh impotent to deal with the great business combinations.
Sometimes they forbade the Nation to interfere, because such
interference trespassed on the rights of the States; sometimes they
forbade the States to interfere (and often they were wise in this),
because to do so would trespass on the rights of the Nation; but always,
or well-nigh always, their action was negative action against the
interests of the people, ingeniously devised to limit their power
against wrong, instead of affirmative action giving to the people power
to right wrong. They had rendered these decisions sometimes as upholders
of property rights against human rights, being especially zealous in
securing the rights of the very men who were most competent to take care
of themselves; and sometimes in the name of liberty, in the name of
the so-called "new freedom," in reality the old, old "freedom,"
which secured to the powerful the freedom to prey on the poor and the
helpless.

One of the main troubles was the fact that the men who saw the evils and
who tried to remedy them attempted to work in two wholly different ways,
and the great majority of them in a way that offered little promise of
real betterment. They tried (by the Sherman law method) to bolster up
an individualism already proved to be both futile and mischievous; to
remedy by more individualism the concentration that was the inevitable
result of the already existing individualism. They saw the evil done
by the big combinations, and sought to remedy it by destroying them and
restoring the country to the economic conditions of the middle of the
nineteenth century. This was a hopeless effort, and those who went into
it, although they regarded themselves as radical progressives, really
represented a form of sincere rural toryism. They confounded monopolies
with big business combinations, and in the effort to prohibit both
alike, instead of where possible prohibiting one and drastically
controlling the other, they succeeded merely in preventing any effective
control of either.

On the other hand, a few men recognized that corporations and
combinations had become indispensable in the business world, that it was
folly to try to prohibit them, but that it was also folly to leave them
without thoroughgoing control. These men realized that the doctrines
of the old laissez faire economists, of the believe