icate that extreme care must
be taken not to interfere with it in a spirit of rashness or ignorance.
Many of those who have made it their vocation to denounce the great
industrial combinations which are popularly, although with technical
inaccuracy, known as "trusts," appeal especially to hatred and fear.
These are precisely the two emotions, particularly when combined with
ignorance, which unfit men for the exercise of cool and steady judgment.
In facing new industrial conditions, the whole history of the world
shows that legislation will generally be both unwise and ineffective
unless undertaken after calm inquiry and with sober self-restraint.
Much of the legislation directed at the trusts would have been
exceedingly mischievous had it not also been entirely ineffective.
In accordance with a well-known sociological law, the ignorant or
reckless agitator has been the really effective friend of the evils
which he has been nominally opposing. In dealing with business
interests, for the Government to undertake by crude and ill-considered
legislation to do what may turn out to be bad, would be to incur the
risk of such far-reaching national disaster that it would be preferable
to undertake nothing at all. The men who demand the impossible or the
undesirable serve as the allies of the forces with which they are
nominally at war, for they hamper those who would endeavor to find out
in rational fashion what the wrongs really are and to what extent and
in what manner it is practicable to apply remedies.

All this is true; and yet it is also true that there are real and grave
evils, one of the chief being over-capitalization because of its many
baleful consequences; and a resolute and practical effort must be made
to correct these evils.

There is a widespread conviction in the minds of the American people
that the great corporations known as trusts are in certain of their
features and tendencies hurtful to the general welfare. This springs
from no spirit of envy or uncharitableness, nor lack of pride in the
great industrial achievements that have placed this country at the head
of the nations struggling for commercial supremacy. It does not rest
upon a lack of intelligent appreciation of the necessity of meeting
changing and changed conditions of trade with new methods, nor upon
ignorance of the fact that combination of capital in the effort to
accomplish great things is necessary when the world's progress demands
that grea