ation.

No great intelligence is required to detect in this situation the
evidence of a vicious circle. The absorption of Americans in business
affairs, and the free hand which the structure and ideals of American
life granted them, had made business competition a fierce and merciless
affair; while at the same time the fluid nature of American economic
conditions made success very precarious. Every shrewd and resolute man
would seek to secure himself against the dangers of this situation by
means of special advantages, and the most effective of all special
advantages would, of course, be special railroad rates. But a shipper
such as John D. Rockefeller could obtain special rates only because the
railroads were in a position similar to his own, and were fighting
strenuously for supremacy. The favored shipper and the railroad both
excused themselves on the ground of self-preservation, and sometimes
even claimed that it was just for a large shipper to obtain better rates
than a small one. This was all very well for the larger shipper and the
railroad, but in the meantime what became of the small shipper, whom Mr.
Rockefeller was enabled to annihilate by means of his contracts with the
railroad companies? The small shipper saw himself forced out of
business, because corporations to whom the state had granted special
privileges as common carriers, had a private interest in doing business
with his bigger, more daring, and unscrupulous competitors.

Of course no such result could have happened, if at any point in this
vicious circle of private interests, there had been asserted a dominant
public interest; and there are several points at which such an interest
might well have been intruded. The circle would have been broken, if,
for instance, the granting of illegal rebates had been effectively
prohibited; but as a matter of fact they could not be effectively
prohibited by the public authorities, to whom either the railroads or
the large shippers were technically responsible. A shipper of oil in
Cleveland, Ohio, would have a difficult time in protesting against
illegal discrimination on the part of a railroad conducting an
inter-state business and organized under the laws of New York. No doubt
he could appeal to the Federal government; but the Federal government
had been, for the time being, disqualified by many different causes from
effective interference. In the first place there was to be overcome the
conventional democrati