tted the domination of private interests.

The failure of the Federal government to protect the public interest in
a matter over which the state governments had no effective control, has
greatly accelerated the organization of American industries on a
national scale, but for private and special purposes. Certain
individuals controlling certain corporations were enabled to obtain a
decided advantage in supplying certain services and products to the
enormously increasing American market; and once those individuals and
corporations had obtained dominant positions, it was in their interest
to strengthen one another's hands in every possible way. One big
corporation has as a rule preferred to do business with another big
corporation. They were all of them producing some standard commodity or
service, and it is part of the economical conduct of such businesses to
buy and sell so far as possible in large quantities and under long
contracts. Such contracts reduced to a comparatively low level the
necessary uncertainties of business. It enabled the managers of these
corporations to count upon a certain market for their product or a
certain cost for part of their raw material; and it must be remembered
that the chief object of this whole work of industrial organization was
to diminish the hazards of unregulated competition and to subject large
business operations to effective control. A conspicuous instance of the
effect of such interests and motives may be seen in the lease of the ore
lands belonging to the Great Northern Railroad to the United States
Steel Corporation. The railroad company owned the largest body of good
ore in the country outside of the control of the Steel Corporation, and
if these lands had been leased to many small companies, the ability of
the independent steel manufacturers to compete with the big steel
company would have been very much increased. But the Great Northern
Railroad Company found it simpler and more secure to do business with
one large than a number of small companies; and in this way the Steel
Corporation has obtained almost a monopoly of the raw material most
necessary to the production of finished steel. It will be understood,
consequently, how inevitably these big corporations strengthen one
another's hands; and it must be added that they had political as well as
economic motives for so doing. Although the big fellows sometimes
indulge in the luxury of fierce fighting, such fights are alway