And State Papers 17? 



advocated is so revolutionary and destructive as to 

 involve the whole community in the crash of com 

 mon disaster, it is as certain as anything can be that 

 when the disaster has occurred all efforts to regulate 

 the trusts will cease, and that the one aim will be 

 to restore prosperity. 



A remedy much advocated at the moment is to 

 take off the tariff from all articles which are made 

 by trusts. To do this it will be necessary first to 

 define trusts. The language commonly used by the 

 advocates of the method implies that they mean all 

 articles made by large corporations, and that the 

 changes in tariff are to be made with punitive intent 

 toward these large corporations. Of course if the 

 tariff is to be changed in order to punish them, 

 it should be changed so as to punish those that do 

 ill, not merely those that are prosperous. It would 

 be neither just nor expedient to punish the big cor 

 porations as big corporations; what we wish to do 

 is to protect the people from any evil that may 

 grow out of their existence or maladministration. 

 Some of those corporations do well and others do 

 ill. If in any case the tariff is found to foster a 

 monopoly which does ill, of course no protectionist 

 would object to a modification of the tariff sufficient 

 to remedy the evil. But in very few cases does the 

 so-called trust really monopolize the market. Take 

 any very big corporation I could mention them by 

 the score which controls, say, something in the 

 neighborhood of half of the products of a given 

 industry. It is the kind of corporation that is always 



