t while
remedy after remedy has been suggested for the evil so generally
acknowledged, none seems to have met with widespread and hearty
approval, and practically the only effect thus far of the popular
agitation has been to warn the trust makers and trust owners that the
public is awakening to the results of their work and is likely to call
them to account.

The truth is, as we shall see later, that it is a difficult matter to
apply an effective remedy of any sort to the trusts by legislation,
without running counter to many established precedents of law and
custom, and without serious interference with what are generally
regarded as inalienable rights. Yet we are making the attempt. Already
legislative and congressional committees have made their tours of
investigation, and bills have been introduced in the legislatures of
many of the States, and in Congress, looking to the restriction or
abolition of trust monopolies.

It is the wise surgeon, however, who, before he takes the knife to cut
out a troublesome growth, carefully diagnoses its origin and cause,
determines whether it is purely local, or whether it springs from the
general state of the whole body, and whether it is the herald of an
organic disease or merely the result of repressed energies or
wrongly-trained organs. So we, in our treatment of the body politic,
will do well to examine most carefully the actual nature of the diseases
which we seek to cure, and discern, if we can, the causes which have
brought them on and tend to perpetuate them. If we can discover these,
we shall, perhaps, be able to cure permanently by removing the ultimate
cause. At any rate, our remedies will be apt to reach the disease far
more effectually than if they were sought out in a haphazard way.

The crudest thinker, at the first attempt to increase his knowledge of
the general nature of trusts, discovers that the problem has a close
connection with others which have long puzzled workers for the public
good. Trusts ally themselves at once in his mind with monopolies, in
whichever form he is most familiar with them, and are apt to be classed
at once, without further consideration, as simply a new device for the
oppression of the laborer by the capitalist. But the man of judicious
and candid mind is not content with any such conclusion; he finds at
once, indeed, that a trust is a combination to suppress competition
among producers of manufactured goods, and he calls to mind the f