supported by appeal to the experience in the field of railroads
and other local utilities, where public opinion has, after long
hesitation, recognized competition to be impracticable and the
acceptance of monopoly as inevitable. As extremes often meet, the view
of the industrial trust as a natural evolution is most favored on the
one hand by men of "big business," already interested financially
in trusts, and on the other hand by the most radical communists (or
socialists) whose ideal is the complete monopolization of industry
under the government.

Sec. 14. #Artificial versus natural growth.# Opposed to this view is a
deep and widespread popular opinion or prejudice, against the trust
and in favor of competition. General opinion in this case (as not
always) finds much support in special economic studies of the methods
by which the existing industrial trusts came into being. First the
question properly is raised; just what is meant by "natural"? In a
sense everything has been the natural outcome of evolution,--the steam
engine, the submarine, the boycott, militarism. In an equally good,
if not better sense, every mechanical invention and every method of
industrial organization is artificial, has been the result of man's
choice and effort. In any case men may choose as good or reject as
unsuitable or bad, any particular mechanical device, and society
may decide to adopt any particular policy toward a certain form of
business organization and certain business practices (unless, indeed,
our philosophy be that of automatism, crude determination or fatalism,
regarding all human affairs).

Now when one examines the methods which the notable trusts actually
did employ, and apparently had to employ, even when they were already
powerful single enterprises, in order to destroy their competitors and
to attain their monopolistic power, the word "natural" seems hardly to
describe the process. The evidence is not a matter of hearsay but is
embodied in a long line of judicial decisions, and in numerous special
inquiries by governmental commissions and officials.[18]

Sec. 15. #Kinds of unfair practices#. This evidence is a startling
array of "unfair practices" and "unfair" forms of competition, which,
however novel in appearance, are essentially of the kind that has been
illegal under the common law for the past five hundred years. Many of
these practices were baldly dishonest, many of them were contemptibly
mean. The manifold var