gives a few individuals. These opportunities do not
amount in any case to a monopoly, but they do amount to a species of
economic privilege which enable them to wring profits from the
increasing American market disproportionate to the value of their
economic services. What is still more unfortunate, however, is the
equivocal position of these big corporations in respect to the laws
under which they are organized, and in respect to the public
authorities which are supposed to control them. Many of the large
railway and industrial corporations have reached their present size
partly by an evasion or a defiance of the law. Their organizers took
advantage of the American system of local self-government and the
American disposition to reduce the functions of the Federal government
to a minimum--they took advantage of these legal conditions and
political ideas to organize an industrial machinery which cannot be
effectively reached by local statutes and officials. The favorable
corporation laws of some states have been used as a means of preying
upon the whole country; and the unfavorable corporation laws of other
states have been practically nullified. The big corporations have proved
to be too big and powerful for the laws and officials to which the
American political system has subjected them; and their equivocal legal
position has resulted in the corruption of American public life and in
the serious deterioration of our system of local government.

The net result of the industrial expansion of the United States since
the Civil War has been the establishment in the heart of the American
economic and social system of certain glaring inequalities of condition
and power. The greater American railroad and industrial corporations
control resources and conduct operations on a scale unprecedented in the
economic history of the world. The great American industrial leaders
have accumulated fortunes for which there is also no precedent on the
part of men who exercise no official political power. These inequalities
are the result of the organization of American industry on almost a
national scale,--an organization which was brought about as a means of
escape from the intolerable evils of unregulated competition. Every
aspect of American business methods has helped to make them inevitable,
and the responsibility for them must be distributed over the whole
business and social fabric. But in spite of the fact that they have
originated as