56 Roosevelt Wild Life Bulletin 



part of our people as to what has been going on. I believe that a 

 half century from now — yes, much sooner — our people will look 

 back at the struggle in which we are engaged and marvel at our 

 short-sightedness. They will look upon it then much as we nowa- 

 days look upon the witchcraft of early New England days. 



Facility of Communication Enlarges Business. For the last 

 twenty-five years the scientist and the inventor have almost daily 

 placed in the hands of the merchant and the manufacturer some new 

 instrument or device that has made it possible for him to speed up 

 his business and reach out and do business at far distant points ; 

 some new device that has made it possible for a single human mind 

 to do infinitely more business than any human mind ever did before. 

 As soon as the business men began to employ these devices, our 

 old man-written laws of a quarter or half century ago were invoked 

 to prosecute these men who. as a matter of fact, were simply u. ing. 

 in their practical everyday work, the discoveries of science and the 

 instruments of the inventor. ■ 



How perfectly absurd it is to allow a man to invent a machine, 

 to applaud and honor him for such invention, and the very next 

 instant attempt to place behind the bars the business man that uses 

 that invention. This is precisely what our country has been doing 

 for a quarter of a century. The telegraph that Mr. Morse invented 

 and the telephone that Mr. Bell invented have been acclaimed as 

 the great discoveries of the age, and these men have been hailed 

 everywhere as great benefactors of the human race; yet had it not 

 been for these two inventions how utterly impossible it would have 

 been to have had an interstate corporation or a so-called trust. Our 

 politicians have told us that the tariff made the trusts. They seem 

 to have forgotten that while we have had a tariff in this country 

 for more than a hundred years, we have only had large interstate 

 corporations for a matter of thirty or forty years. Intercommuni- 

 cation, improved and developed through the use of electricity, has 

 been the underlying cause of the great industrial interstate and inter- 

 national enterprises. Raise or lower the tariff as much as you 

 please, and leave modern intercommunication undisturbed, and your 

 great interstate and international industrial unit of today would 

 continue ; but take away the strange force which we call electricity, 

 and your interstate and international business concern would fall 

 to pieces in short order. The telephone, not the tariff, made the 

 trusts. 



