24 



HARDWOOD RECORD 



establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common 

 defense, promote general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty 

 to ourselves and posterity." Monopoly imperils liberty. The present 

 administration regards the destruction of a monopoly as the only 

 means of safeguarding industrial liberty. It has therefore entered 

 upon a campaign for the disorganization of highly organized industry. 

 The campaign neither establishes justice, insures domestic tranquility 

 nor promotes general welfare; and is wholly ineffectual to secure the 

 blessings of industrial liberty. The evil of monopoly is not merely 

 that it has the power to fix prices, limit output and deteriorate quality. 

 It has power to crush competition. Therefore it is destructive of 

 industrial liberty. 



A union of laborers which establishes a labor monopoly denies lib- 

 erty to the non-union laborer. A union of capitalists which estab- 

 lishes a monopoly denies liberty to the independent organization. But 

 the remedy is not to break up the union, whether of labor or capital. 

 For over twenty years this country has been attempting to break 

 up unions of capital, and has failed. An attempt to dissolve the 

 Standard Oil Company has been made, but when the stock of the 

 various allied corporations has been redistributed among the stock- 

 holders, those stockholders will still leave the business to be controlled 

 by the few. The same attempt is being made against the tobacco 

 trust, the steel trust, and other minor trusts. The impracticability of 

 disorganizing the organized industries is well put in a bon mot attrib- 

 uted to J. Pierpont Morgan, ' ' You can 't unscramble an egg. ' ' 



Decrees of court enforcing the anti-trust law, and decreeing the 

 disorganization of organized industry, wiU not secure the blessing of 

 industrial liberty to this country. It does not insure domestic tran- 

 quility, but it does the very reverse. It insures agitation, unrest and 

 anxiety, and disturbs industrial peace. 



It has taken twenty years for the courts to attempt to find out 

 what the Sherman anti-trust law means, and neither the courts nor 

 the country have yet been informed. Hence it may fairly be pre- 

 sumed that the opinion of Mr. Grosscup on the subject of this law is 

 very intelligently founded. 



The Outlook alleges that the policy that can discover no remedy 

 for the peril of great organizations, except to declare them criminal, if 

 they are too great, does not promote the general welfare, but invites 

 general adversity. Yet all this might be endured if it established jus- 

 tice, but it does not. What it does do is to establish injustice. Noth- 

 ing should be made criminal that is not immoral. If a man or a set 

 of men have the ability to make better goods than their neighbors, 

 and to sell them at a lower price, that is not immoral. If a body of 

 men combine in order to make better goods than their neighbors and 

 sell them at a lower price, that is not immoral. To punish men as 

 criminals who have the ability to employ thousands of laborers where 

 formerly hundreds were employed is not to establish justice, rather it 

 is a monstrous injustice. 



What the country wants is a policy which will insure industrial or- 

 ganization and honor industrial success; and at the same time protect 

 the country from both causeless fears and the real perils of monopoly, 

 by bringing all the great industrial organizations under governmental 

 regulation and control. The way to secure industrial liberty is not to 

 weaken industry, but to make it obedient to law. 



The Outlook regards the way to justice, tranquility, general welfare 

 and industrial liberty as absolutely clear, and says if the president 

 and attorney-general will devote their abilities to working out a 

 scheme for the administration, supervision and regulation of the great 

 corporations engaging in interstate commerce, they will win great 

 honor for themselves and secure greater blessings for their country. 



The Trust of Trusts 



The Washington correspondent of the Chicago Eecord-Herald a few 

 days ago wired that paper that the so-called "money trust" now is 

 engaging the earne.st attention of the administration. This combina- 

 tion of capital centered in a bare handful of men is alleged to exert 

 control over the industrial development of the country with power to 

 dictate precisely on what lines development shall run, and to prevent 

 it whenever it interferes with established organizations. In short, it 

 is held to be the giant power behind all the individual trusts. It is 



full time an awakening should come about on this important subject. 

 The coterie of men headed by Mr. Morgan certainly does influence 

 industrial development or want of development in this country to an 

 extent that places the average man's business in a very precarious 

 situation. How far the ramifications of this trust go is unknown, but 

 it is a matter of general repute that it controls the railroads to a very 

 large extent; it controls the cement industry; a large element of the 

 car-building industry; is very prominent in oU; is largely interested 

 in automobile manufacture ; is the power behind the throne in the steel 

 trust, and is mixed up directly or indirectly in the majority of the 

 leading industries of the country. These few men with the untold 

 millions of capital under their control are so closely identified with 

 these industries as to make it impractical for the raising of any con- 

 siderable sums for new industrial developments in any direction that 

 are competitive of existing ones controlled by this giant monopoly. 

 The money trust undeniably is the trust of trusts, and, as expressed 

 in the cartoon of this issue, is the modern Fagin that is responsible 

 for the commercial thievery of the many lesser trusts. 



The dispatch referred to cites the fact that President Taft has 

 been told the story of how the combined forces in the financial world 

 have frustrated the plans for an independent steamship company that 

 was to operate between the two coasts on the completion of the Pan- 

 ama canal. This proposed venture was designed to be free from all 

 railroad entanglement and make practical cheap rates for transporta- 

 tion, which the Panama canal in a large part is intended to provide. 

 The floatation of the enterprise had the support of President Roose- 

 velt and his cabinet, but has been ^andoned because the people at 

 its head found that influences controlling the banks made it impossible 

 to finance a scheme that would place transportation in competition 

 with existing transcontinental railroad lines. 



This citation is only one of scores of examples of proposed indus- 

 trial expansion that have been frustrated by the so-called money 

 trust. It is alleged that the administration forces purpose to pay no 

 little consideration to the general development of the future relation 

 of the government to business and to new plans of constructive legis- 

 lation. If the government can find some means of breaking up the 

 money trust, the satellites of this giant monopoly can be handled very 

 easily. 



Decline in Oak Output 



Prom the preliminary report of the Census Bureau is gleaned the 

 information that oak, which is the foremost hardwood pi'oduct in the 

 United States, decUned in cut during 1910 to 3,.522,098,000 feet, as 

 compared with an output of 4,414,000,000 feet in 1909. While this is 

 a tremendous shrinkage in output to be witnessed in a single year, oak 

 still ranks third in point of volume of production, being exceeded by 

 yellow pine and Douglas fir only. Oak timber is very widely distrib- 

 uted in the states, thirty-seven of which produce more or less of it. 

 The center of oak production to a considerable extent is in West Vir- 

 ginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, where nearly 35 per cent was manu- 

 factured during 1910. 



The total reported production of lumber during 1910 was 40,018,- 

 218,000 feet, as against 44,.509,761,000 feet in 1909. Washington 

 stands at the head of all states in the volume of lumber output. Soft 

 woods supplied 77.9 per cent of the total lumber production of 1910, 

 leaving 22.1 per cent for hardwoods. The composition of this, total 

 has not varied materially during the last four years, although marked 

 difference in annual production li.is m-r-nrn'd in tliis period. 



Steel Freight Catfs 



A pei'sii;il i>f III!' article iin "Steel \ s. Wnmli'ii h'liilioiui Cars'' in 

 this issue will convince renders that the inucli touted eflicieney of all- 

 steel freight cars is entirely mythical, and that railroads which h.ave 

 taken on this class of equipment are finding themselves in all sorts of 

 difliculties in connection with this type of freight cars, of which an 

 annual increase of twenty per cent in repair bills is among the least. 

 Everything points to the fact that steel freight cars are just as 

 fraudulent as all-steel Pullmans. The " Morganizing" of legitimate 

 American manufacturing enterprises is proving :i heavy burden to 

 many interests. 



