IS COMBINATION CRIME? 



43 



tion, combination, or " trust " organized for business purposes is 

 a " corner " in tlie thing manufactured, and therefore against the 

 written law of the land as well as the public interest. He is 

 wrong here at the outset. Everybody who knows anything 

 about the matter knows that to " corner " a product is to raise 

 its price, not to the consumer, but to the operators against whom 

 the " corner " is engineered. However disastrous a " corner " 

 may be to the " shorts " who fight it : ultimately fatal to the 

 schemers (who risk public indignation if they succeed or the 

 prospect of bankruptcy if they fail in sustaining it), I have yet 

 to learn of any permanent injury to the consumer — or to the 

 great body of the people — resulting from the wickedest corner 

 that ever was attempted. Without attempting any palliation of 

 or excuse for the gamblers who stack staples instead of " chips " 

 and shuffle values instead of cards, it is yet, perhaps, proper to 

 suggest that even trusts, combinations, and incorporations for 

 business purposes are of some ultimate good to the community 

 and benefit to the bread-winner ; and to point out the actual fact 

 that, so far from raising, it is to the immediate interest of a 

 combination of small business interests into a large one to at 

 once cheapen the prices of its product to the very minimum 

 margin of profit at which manufacture can be carried on. 

 Otherwise, the crop of new combinations to be bought out 

 would be endless. For, surely, so long as the product in which 

 the combination deals can be manufactured at a profit, just so 

 long will there be manufacturers. Mr. Hudson, no doubt, burns 

 gas. But any consumer of illuminating oil can tell him that 

 he can buy from an agent of Mr. Hudson's pet grievance, the 

 Standard Oil Company, cheaper* than he could before there 

 was any such terrible " octopus," and when every producer had 

 his favorite jobber; and if Mr. Hudson ever sent a telegram 

 from New York to Chicago before the days of^ the Western 

 Union Telegraph Company (which, naughty as it is, only 

 charges twenty-five cents for ten words to Chicago), at the rate 

 of about two dollars per ten words to Chicago, without grum- 

 bling at the positive incongruity of the price, he is a much more 

 reasonable man than some of his readers take him to be. And 

 to demonstrate that — whatever the immediate causes — the im- 

 mediate effect of combinations is apt to be to convenience rather 

 than to incommode the customer or client; let me allude, in 

 passing, to (what everybody knows) the fact that the single 



* The Standard Oil Company has so reduced the cost of the process of refining that 

 the price of refined oil has been lowered from seventy to less than seven cents per gal- 

 lon. The people who paid four dollars per capita for light now pay less than forty cents 

 per capita, which is equivalent to a benefit to the people of this country (counting them 

 at 60,000,000) of $216,000,000 per anaum.— "New York Tribune," May 15, 18S7. 



