t each other half-way in a common effort to square business
methods with both public opinion and the law. The best informed men of
the business world condemn the methods and processes and consequences of
monopoly as we condemn them; and the instinctive judgment of the vast
majority of business men everywhere goes with them. We shall now be
their spokesmen. That is the strength of our position and the sure
prophecy of what will ensue when our reasonable work is done.

When serious contest ends, when men unite in opinion and purpose, those
who are to change their ways of business joining with those who ask for
the change, it is possible to effect it in the way in which prudent and
thoughtful and patriotic men would wish to see it brought about with as
few, as slight, as easy and simple business readjustments as possible in
the circumstances, nothing essential disturbed, nothing torn up by the
roots, no parts rent asunder which can be left in wholesome combination.
Fortunately, no measures of sweeping or novel change are necessary. It
will be understood that our object is _not_ to unsettle business or
anywhere seriously to break its established courses athwart. On the
contrary, we desire the laws we are now about to pass to be the bulwarks
and safeguards of industry against the forces that have disturbed it.
What we have to do can be done in a new spirit, in thoughtful
moderation, without revolution of any untoward kind.

We are all agreed that "private monopoly is indefensible and
intolerable," and our program is founded upon that conviction. It will
be a comprehensive but not a radical or unacceptable program and these
are its items, the changes which opinion deliberately sanctions and for
which business waits:

It waits with acquiescence, in the first place, for laws which will
effectually prohibit and prevent such interlockings of the _personnel_
of the directorates of great corporations--banks and railroads,
industrial, commercial, and public service bodies--as in effect result
in making those who borrow and those who lend practically one and the
same, those who sell and those who buy but the same persons trading with
one another under different names and in different combinations, and
those who affect to compete in fact partners and masters of some whole
field of business. Sufficient time should be allowed, of course, in
which to effect these changes of organization without inconvenience or
confusion.

Such a pro