80 PETER S. GROSSCUP 



public toward these, though interesting, is fundamentally 

 different from its attitude toward the so-called trusts. Large 

 private enterprise is the legitimate fruit of the freedom of the 

 individual — a freedom as ancient as society — a freedom that 

 the public, even when most over heated, has never yet seriously 

 challenged. The so-called trusts are, on the other hand, the 

 offspring of our own times, created under corporation statutes 

 framed by our own legislatures, and dependent for their ex- 

 istence upon the continued existence of the corporate power 

 thus given. Nor do I seek, on this occasion, a definition ap- 

 plicable to trusts that would be accepted in a court of law ; nor 

 one that would meet the mind of industrial experts. My sole 

 purpose is to meet and discuss the subject, not as it lies in the 

 mind of the specially informed, but as it lies in the mind of the 

 public at large. 



When I was a boy in Ohio, we baked our bread on our 

 own hearth or got it from the town baker ; the flour came from 

 the town mill ; our shoes were made by our neighbor, the shoe- 

 maker; from a loom turned by the town creek came the cloth 

 that covered our backs; a nail mill in an adjoining town sup- 

 plied us with nails and other metal implements. We were with- 

 out radiators; but our stoves were made in the next county; 

 our houses were built by the town carpenter, of lumber sawed 

 in the town mill; on every hand was the hammering, the hum, 

 and the bustle of the individual artisan. The community 

 might have existed as an inaccessible island; it was so well 

 equipped to take care of itself. Of course, beyond the circle 

 where the earth and sky met, was the great world; but it was 

 an almost unknown world. 



The years crept away, and with them went the shops 

 with the familiar signs. The shoemaker took down his wooden 

 boot; our shoes came from Massachusetts. The nail mill 

 turned a ruin; nails were now made in some far away shop in 

 Pennsylvania. Our wheat flour came from Minnesota; stoves 

 gave place to radiators bearing foreign names; the saddler dis- 

 appeared; the bricklayer disappeared; the man who supplied 

 our wants was no longer the man we bowed to as our neighbor. 

 The horizon had lifted, and out into the mist slipped our old 

 world, and in came the great world. All this was a step in the 



