eful, the most uneconomical, and,
after they pass a certain size, the most inefficient, way of conducting
the industries of this country.

A notable example is the way in which Mr. Carnegie was bought out of the
steel business. Mr. Carnegie could build better mills and make better
steel rails and make them cheaper than anybody else connected with what
afterward became the United States Steel Corporation. They didn't dare
leave him outside. He had so much more brains in finding out the best
processes; he had so much more shrewdness in surrounding himself with the
most successful assistants; he knew so well when a young man who came into
his employ was fit for promotion and was ripe to put at the head of some
branch of his business and was sure to make good, that he could undersell
every mother's son of them in the market for steel rails. And they bought
him out at a price that amounted to three or four times,--I believe
actually five times,--the estimated value of his properties and of his
business, because they couldn't beat him in competition. And then in what
they charged afterward for their product,--the product of his mills
included,--they made us pay the interest on the four or five times the
difference.

That is the difference between a big business and a trust. A trust is an
arrangement to get rid of competition, and a big business is a business
that has survived competition by conquering in the field of intelligence
and economy. A trust does not bring efficiency to the aid of business; it
_buys efficiency out of business_. I am for big business, and I am against
the trusts. Any man who can survive by his brains, any man who can put the
others out of the business by making the thing cheaper to the consumer at
the same time that he is increasing its intrinsic value and quality, I
take off my hat to, and I say: "You are the man who can build up the
United States, and I wish there were more of you."

There will not be more, unless we find a way to prevent monopoly. You know
perfectly well that a trust business staggering under a capitalization
many times too big is not a business that can afford to admit competitors
into the field; because the minute an economical business, a business with
its capital down to hard pan, with every ounce of its capital working,
comes into the field against such an overloaded corporation, it will
inevitably beat it and undersell it; therefore it is to the interest of
these gentlemen