Sherman Anti-Trust Law,
but the tempering of the recognition with certain statutory regulations.
It by no means follows that such regulation satisfies all the objects of
a constructive national economic policy. In fact it does not satisfy the
needs of a national economic policy at all, just in so far as such a
policy is concerned not merely with the organization of industry, but
with the distribution of wealth. But inasmuch as the decision has
already been reached in preceding chapters that the national interest of
a democratic state is essentially concerned with the distribution of
wealth, the corporation problem must be considered quite as much in its
relation to the social problem as to the problem of economic efficiency.

The American corporation problem will never be understood in its proper
relations and full consequences until it is conceived as a sort of an
advanced attack on the breastworks of our national economic system by
this essential problem of the distribution of wealth. The current
experiments in the direction of corporate "regulation" are prompted by a
curious mixture of divergent motives. They endeavor to evade a
fundamental responsibility by meeting a superficial one. They endeavor
to solve the corporation problem merely by eradicating abuses, the
implication being that as soon as the abuses are supervised out of
existence, the old harmony between public and private interest in the
American economic system will be restored, and no more "socialistic"
legislation will be required. But the extent to which this very
regulation is being carried betrays the futility of the expectation. And
as we have seen, the intention of the industrial reformers is to
introduce public management into the heart of the American industrial
system; that is, into the operation of railroads and public service
corporations, and in this way to bring about by incessant official
interference that harmony between public and private interest which must
be the object of a national economic system. But this proposed remedy is
simply one more way of shirking the ultimate problem; and it is the
logical consequence of the persistent misinterpretation of our
unwholesome economic inequalities as the result merely of the abuse,
instead of the legal use, of the opportunities provided by the existing
economic system.

An economic organization framed in the national interest would conform
to the same principles as a political organization fra