ry in our forty-nine jurisdictions we have been going
forty-nine times over the experience of England and other countries, in
connection with each effort to force up the competitive level. We have
seemed to be quite unable to apply the most obvious lessons of
experience either at home or abroad to new cases, and yet essentially
the same uniformity of adaptation has occurred here as abroad. Like our
employer, whom a strike impelled to adopt an advanced policy toward
labor, we find after the event that we should not know how to do
business under the standards in force before the law compelled a
change.

Enforcement of the Sherman Anti-Trust Law has been frequently cited as
an example of unwise government interference. With respect to many of
the incidents of enforcements, criticism has been well founded. But the
net result of that enforcement has been a much sounder body of law on
the important subject of fair and unfair competition. Besides, we now
have in the Federal Trade Commission the beginnings of an
administrative organization for dealing with the whole subject of
monopoly and restraint of trade. And more than all this, we have a
better prospect than ever before, of some sort of mutual respect
between government and business, and of honest cooperation in working
out their mutual problems. It is not likely that the Anti-Trust Law has
prevented honest men from earning legitimate profits from legitimate
business service to anything like the extent which would be indicated
by the vigor with which it has been opposed. But even if it has, we
have received something for the price paid.

And so the list might be lengthened, pure food and drugs, meat
inspection, public service regulation, industrial safety, and the
rest,--in nearly every case, from a purely business point of view,
opposition, in so far as it related to the main point of government
policy, has been a mistake. Refusal of the business men affected to
accept a policy of regulation has tended to shut them out of the
councils in making adjustments of detail. This fact has hindered the
government in performing a service which in most cases both the public
and the business needed to have done.

Even when we admit, as obviously we must, the persistence of conflict
between different interests with respect to a large mass of business
detail, the fact of group influences and social control still remains
an important consideration to which business analysis must give