56 
Roosevelt Wild Life Bulletin 
part of our people as to what has Ijeen going on. I beheve 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 aljsurd 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. IMorse invented 
and the telephone that Mr. Bell in\ented 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 in\entions how utterly impossible it would have 
l)een to have had an interstate corporation or a so-called trust. Our 
politicians have told us that the taril^ made the trusts. They seem 
to have forgotten that while we have had a tarilY in this country 
for more than a hundred years, we have only had large interstate 
corporations for a matter of thirty or forty }ears. Intercommuni- 
cation, improved and developed through the use of electricit}-, has 
been the underh ing 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 iir.it 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 larilT, made the 
trusts. 
