e affair; it is a public affair.

I have been told by a great many men that the idea I have, that by
restoring competition you can restore industrial freedom, is based upon a
failure to observe the actual happenings of the last decades in this
country; because, they say, it is just free competition that has made it
possible for the big to crush the little.

I reply, it is not free competition that has done that; it is illicit
competition. It is competition of the kind that the law ought to stop, and
can stop,--this crushing of the little man.

You know, of course, how the little man is crushed by the trusts. He gets
a local market. The big concerns come in and undersell him in his local
market, and that is the only market he has; if he cannot make a profit
there, he is killed. They can make a profit all through the rest of the
Union, while they are underselling him in his locality, and recouping
themselves by what they can earn elsewhere. Thus their competitors can be
put out of business, one by one, wherever they dare to show a head.
Inasmuch as they rise up only one by one, these big concerns can see to it
that new competitors never come into the larger field. You have to begin
somewhere. You can't begin in space. You can't begin in an airship. You
have got to begin in some community. Your market has got to be your
neighbors first and those who know you there. But unless you have
unlimited capital (which of course you wouldn't have when you were
beginning) or unlimited credit (which these gentlemen can see to it that
you shan't get), they can kill you out in your local market any time they
try, on the same basis exactly as that on which they beat organized labor;
for they can sell at a loss in your market because they are selling at a
profit everywhere else, and they can recoup the losses by which they beat
you by the profits which they make in fields where they have beaten other
fellows and put them out. If ever a competitor who by good luck has plenty
of money does break into the wider market, then the trust has to buy him
out, paying three or four times what the business is worth. Following
such a purchase it has got to pay the interest on the price it has paid
for the business, and it has got to tax the whole people of the United
States, in order to pay the interest on what it borrowed to do that, or on
the stocks and bonds it issued to do it with. Therefore the big trusts,
the big combinations, are the most wast