time, and, therefore, I
assume that they believe, that trusts are inevitable. They don't say that
big business is inevitable. They don't say merely that the elaboration of
business upon a great co-operative scale is characteristic of our time and
has come about by the natural operation of modern civilization. We would
admit that. But they say that the particular kind of combinations that are
now controlling our economic development came into existence naturally and
were inevitable; and that, therefore, we have to accept them as
unavoidable and administer our development through them. They take the
analogy of the railways. The railways were clearly inevitable if we were
to have transportation, but railways after they are once built stay put.
You can't transfer a railroad at convenience; and you can't shut up one
part of it and work another part. It is in the nature of what economists,
those tedious persons, call natural monopolies; simply because the whole
circumstances of their use are so stiff that you can't alter them. Such
are the analogies which these gentlemen choose when they discuss the
modern trust.

I admit the popularity of the theory that the trusts have come about
through the natural development of business conditions in the United
States, and that it is a mistake to try to oppose the processes by which
they have been built up, because those processes belong to the very nature
of business in our time, and that therefore the only thing we can do, and
the only thing we ought to attempt to do, is to accept them as inevitable
arrangements and make the best out of it that we can by regulation.

I answer, nevertheless, that this attitude rests upon a confusion of
thought. Big business is no doubt to a large extent necessary and natural.
The development of business upon a great scale, upon a great scale of
co-operation, is inevitable, and, let me add, is probably desirable. But
that is a very different matter from the development of trusts, because
the trusts have not grown. They have been artificially created; they have
been put together, not by natural processes, but by the will, the
deliberate planning will, of men who were more powerful than their
neighbors in the business world, and who wished to make their power secure
against competition.

The trusts do not belong to the period of infant industries. They are not
the products of the time, that old laborious time, when the great
continent we live on was unde