86 PETER S. GROSSCUP 



well as to equalize consumption, but the effect is, none the 

 less, smaller prices to the public than individual manufac- 

 turers would have exacted. But, take the argument at its 

 worst, and assume that certain trusts have put up prices. 

 What then? Should all the so-called trusts be exterminated 

 because here and there one has offended? Should the wheat 

 be destroyed with the tare? Why not— here as elsewhere— 

 apply to the offender, and to him alone, the correctives of the 

 law? I see no obstacle, myself, in the way of effective legisla- 

 tion, or of effective execution of the common law, that will 

 adequately protect the public against prices that are artificial 

 —prices made possible, either by a cornering of the supply, 

 or by conspiracies in restraint of competition. 



We often hear, as an objection, that the capital of the so- 

 called trusts is large; that such concentration of capital, in 

 one control, unsettles our conception of what a single in- 

 dividual may own; that, as in the case of one of the so-called 

 trusts, its fiscal transactions measure, in volume and impor- 

 tance, with the fiscal transactions of the government itself. 

 To my mind, this is largely an inherited bugbear, brought over 

 from the days of smaller things. We live in an age of large 

 things. If we wish to go back to the day of small things, we 

 must be prepared to put up with the inconveniences and 

 limitations of those days. In the nature of things, great en- 

 terprises must be under a few controlling minds; and, I may 

 ask, who so worthy of power — here or elsewhere — as the man 

 who, by sheer buoyancy of talent, has come to the top? By 

 what safer guide could the controlling hand of a great indus- 

 try be selected? Whom, for instance, could the 27,000 men 

 employed in the establishment of the late Philip Armour have 

 found so well equipped by experience and genius to direct 

 their establishment? What would have been the outcome, 

 had the owner of that establishment turned it over to his em- 

 ployees, to be their own in equal parts, and managed there- 

 after as an industrial democracy? Set apart to some work for 

 mankind, we all are; and though some rise to an ownership 

 and responsibilities that appear vast, they are in the last 

 analysis trusteeships only— trusts that can not be resigned 

 unless the power that goes with them is also relinquished. But 



