uring this very time trusts grew greater in number and power than
in the whole history of the world before; and their evils flourished
unhindered and unchecked. These great business concerns grew because
natural laws made them grow and artificial law at war with natural law
could not stop their growth. But their evils grew faster than the trusts
themselves because avarice nourished those evils and no law of any kind
stopped avarice from nourishing them.

Nor is this the worst. Under the shifting interpretation of the Sherman
law, uncertainty and fear is chilling the energies of the great body of
honest American business men. As the Sherman law now stands, no two
business men can arrange their mutual affairs and be sure that they are
not law-breakers. This is the main hindrance to the immediate and
permanent revival of American business. If German or English business
men, with all their disadvantages compared with our advantages, were
manacled by our Sherman law, as it stands, they soon would be bankrupt.
Indeed, foreign business men declare that, if their countries had such a
law, so administered, they could not do business at all.

Even this is not all. By the decrees of our courts, under the Sherman
law, the two mightiest trusts on earth have actually been licensed, in
the practical outcome, to go on doing every wrong they ever committed.
Under the decrees of the courts the Oil and Tobacco Trusts still can
raise prices unjustly and already have done so. They still can issue
watered stock and surely will do so. They still can throttle other
business men and the United Cigar Stores Company now is doing so. They
still can corrupt our politics and this moment are indulging in that
practice.

The people are tired of this mock battle with criminal capital. They do
not want to hurt business, but they do want to get something done about
the trust question that amounts to something. What good does it do any
man to read in his morning paper that the courts have "dissolved" the
Oil Trust, and then read in his evening paper that he must thereafter
pay a higher price for his oil than ever before? What good does it do
the laborer who smokes his pipe to be told that the courts have
"dissolved" the Tobacco Trust and yet find that he must pay the same or
a higher price for the same short-weight package of tobacco? Yet all
this is the practical result of the suits against these two greatest
trusts in the world.

Such business chaos