Live Stock Breeders' Association. 287 



good thing, that is, a sufficiently good thing, to justify the ap- 

 parent moral wrong for those who have horses beyond the neces- 

 sity of their use to take horses from those who have hardly as 

 many as they need, would also be a question concerning which 

 there could be no serious difference of opinion. But, notwithstand- 

 ing this fact, there has been conducted in this country for the last 

 ten years, through every avenue of expression and public discus- 

 sion, a general free-for-all joint debate on the question as to 

 whether it is a good thing or a bad things for those individuals 

 and corporations who have much of the world's wealth to take 

 from those who have little of the world's wealth their money and 

 their property by means which the law denounces as unlawful and 

 contrary to the statutes and the common law of the states. (Ap- 

 plause.) 



This question, I say, has been the question we have heard dis- 

 cussed so much in this country, and the difficulty in the contro- 

 versy has been that we have undertaken to look upon the question 

 rather from an economic than a legal standpoint. There has never 

 been any question from a legal standpoint but that all trusts were 

 bad trusts. There has never been any question from the legal 

 standpoint but that when a man entered into a combination in re- 

 straint of trade or competition ; that when men entered into a com- 

 bination or agreement by which some man in a distant city could 

 say to the farmers of Missouri how much they should receive for 

 their produce, there has never been any question in law but that 

 those men were committing a crime and should be punished like 

 other criminal offenders at the bar of justice. 



It is interesting, in view of the present attitude upon this 

 question, to look back upon the last decade through which we have 

 passed and to consider why it is that there has been such a befog- 

 ging of the public mind upon a proposition concerning which there 

 should have been no controversy. 



This is the result of two conditions. After the close of the 

 war between the states this country entered upon a most remark- 

 able period of material development. That period has witnessed 

 the reclamation from a desert west of that territory lying between 

 the Mississippi and the Sierras. It has witnessed the development 

 of our internal and foreign commerce in a measure unprecedented. 

 It has witnessed the growth of new industries and the development 

 of the old. It has been a period of prosperity unequalled, perhaps, 

 by any in the history of the civilized world. It has been a period 

 in which we have seen the new development in person of the 



