nd give the laborer all he
earns, he has a fair and equal chance, and equity requires no more. It
is justice and opportunity, a fair chance, that the poor need, not
pity and gifts of charity.

2. Great combines of capital in business and especially in industrial
trusts are receiving the closest attention of the thoughtful. Some
regard them as the necessary result of successful and enlarging
business. Many others regard them as hostile to the public good and
are anxiously seeking a means of restraining their great and
increasing power.

These were at the first associations of manufacturers who co-operated
to maintain prices. In the competitive system there is a constant
pressure on the part of the consumer for lower prices. The
manufacturer who is conscientious and a model employer, seeking to
maintain prices sufficiently high to afford him a profit and living
wages for his employes, must ever be resisting this pressure. They
united for this purpose and were benevolent and just in their design.
But the manufacturers were paying tribute on borrowed capital. They
must meet the demands of interest on their debts and also the wages of
their workmen. Between these two they struggled to secure for
themselves comfortable wages. The capitalists, seeing the advantage of
this co-operation and the resultant profits, undertook and
accomplished the combination of their capital to secure for themselves
the profits at first sought for the operators and their employes.

These great combines are the natural result of successful business
with the practice of usury. They threaten evil.

The purpose and plan of the present trust is to increase the increase
of the capital; to make the capital more productive; to bring larger
returns for the wealth invested.

(_a_) They are not organized for the benefit of the laborer. The
object is to decrease the cost by producing with less labor. The less
the labor, other things being equal, the greater the returns for the
capital invested.

(_b_) They are not organized for the benefit of the consumer. When
they do favor the consumer it is only incidental and generally
temporary to meet competition. They make no pretence of being
benevolent in their purposes. They are organized for the purpose of
business gain.

(_c_) These capitalists combine their interests because they can
thereby secure a greater return from their investments than they can
by operating separately. They combine that they may m