veloped, the young nation struggling to find
itself and get upon its feet amidst older and more experienced
competitors. They belong to a very recent and very sophisticated age, when
men knew what they wanted and knew how to get it by the favor of the
government.

Did you ever look into the way a trust was made? It is very natural, in
one sense, in the same sense in which human greed is natural. If I
haven't efficiency enough to beat my rivals, then the thing I am inclined
to do is to get together with my rivals and say: "Don't let's cut each
other's throats; let's combine and determine prices for ourselves;
determine the output, and thereby determine the prices: and dominate and
control the market." That is very natural. That has been done ever since
freebooting was established. That has been done ever since power was used
to establish control. The reason that the masters of combination have
sought to shut out competition is that the basis of control under
competition is brains and efficiency. I admit that any large corporation
built up by the legitimate processes of business, by economy, by
efficiency, is natural; and I am not afraid of it, no matter how big it
grows. It can stay big only by doing its work more thoroughly than anybody
else. And there is a point of bigness,--as every business man in this
country knows, though some of them will not admit it,--where you pass the
limit of efficiency and get into the region of clumsiness and
unwieldiness. You can make your combine so extensive that you can't
digest it into a single system; you can get so many parts that you can't
assemble them as you would an effective piece of machinery. The point of
efficiency is overstepped in the natural process of development
oftentimes, and it has been overstepped many times in the artificial and
deliberate formation of trusts.

A trust is formed in this way: a few gentlemen "promote" it--that is to
say, they get it up, being given enormous fees for their kindness, which
fees are loaded on to the undertaking in the form of securities of one
kind or another. The argument of the promoters is, not that every one who
comes into the combination can carry on his business more efficiently than
he did before; the argument is: we will assign to you as your share in the
pool twice, three times, four times, or five times what you could have
sold your business for to an individual competitor who would have to run
it on an economic and competiti