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will be largely, and perhaps alto- 
gether, under the same _ control. 
Such action is harsh and mischiev- 
ous if the corporation is guilty of 
nothing except its size; and where, 
as in the case of the Standard Oil, 
and especially the Tobacco, trusts, 
the corporation has been guilty of 
immoral and anti-social practices, 
there is need for far more drastic 
and thoroughgoing action than any 
that has been taken, under the re- 
cent decree of the Supreme Court. 
In the case of the Tobacco Trust, for 
instance, the settlement in the Cir- 
cuit Court, in which the represen- 
tatives of the Government seem in- 
clined to coneur, practically leaves 
all of the companies still substan- 
tially under the control of the 
twenty-nine original defendants. 
Such a result is lamentable from the 
standpoint of justice. The decision 
of the Circuit Court, if allowed to 
stand, means that the Tobacco Trust 
has merely been obliged to change 
its clothes, that none of the real of- 
fenders have received any real pun- 
ishment, while, as the New York 
‘‘Times,’’ a pro-trust paper, says, 
the tobacco concerns, in their new 
clothes, are in positions of ‘‘ease and 
luxury,’’ and ‘‘immune from prose- 
cution under the law.”’ 
Surely, miscarriage of justice is 
not too strong a term to apply to 
such a result when considered in 
connection with what the Supreme 
Court said of this Trust. That great 
Court in its decision used language 
which, in spite of its habitual and 
severe self-restraint in stigmatizing 
wrong-doing, yet unhesitatingly con- 
demns the Tobacco Trust for moral 
turpitude, saying that the case 
shows an ‘‘everpresent manifesta- 
tion. . . of conscious wrong-doing’’ 
by the Trust, whose history is ‘‘re- 
plete with the doing of acts which 
it was the obvious purpose of the 
statute to forbid, demonstra- 
tive of the existence from the begin- 
ning of a purpose to acquire domin- 
ion and control of the tobacco trade, 
not by the mere exertion of the or- 
dinary right to contract and to 
trade, but by methods devised in 
order to monopolize the trade by 
driving competitors out of business, 
which were ruthlessly carried out 
upon the assumption that to work 
upon the fears or play upon the: cu- 
pidity of competitors would make 
suecess possible.’’ The letters from 
and to various officials of the Trust, 
which were put in evidence, show a 
literally astounding and horrifying 
indulgence by the Trust in wicked 
and depraved business methods— 
such as the ‘‘endeavor to cause a 
strike in their (a rival business 
firm’s) factory,’’ or the ‘‘shutting 
off the market’’ of an independent 
tobaceo firm by ‘‘taking the neces- 
sary steps to give them a warm re- 
ception,’’ or forcing importers into 
a price agreement by causing and 
continuing ‘‘a demoralization of the 
business for such length of time as 
may be deemed desirable’’ (I quote 
from the letters). A Trust guilty of 
such conduct should be absolutely 
disbanded, and the only way to pre- 
vent the repetition of such conduct 
is by strict Government supervision, 
and not merely by lawsuits. 
The Anti-Trust Law cannot meet 
the whole situation, nor can any 
modification of the principle of the 
Anti-Trust Law avail to meet the 
whole situation. The fact is that 
many of the men who have ealled 
themselves Progressives, and who 
certainly believe that they are Pro- 
gressives, represent in reality in this 
matter not progress at all but a kind 
of sincere rural toryism. These men 
believe that it is possible’ by 
strengthening the Anti-Trust Law 
to restore business to the competi- 
tive conditions of the middle of the 
last century. Any such effort is 
foredoomed to end in failure, and, 
if suecessful, would be mischievous 
to the last degree. Business cannot 
be successfully conducted in accord- 
ance with the practices and theories 
of sixty years ago unless we abolish 
steam, electricity, big cities, and, in 
short, not only all modern business 
and modern industrial conditions, 
but all the modern conditions of our 
civilization. The effort to restore 
competition as it was sixty years 
ago, and to trust for justice solely 
to this proposed restoration of com- 
petition, is just as foolish as if we 
should go back to the flintlocks of 
Washington’s Continentals as a sub- 
stitute for modern weapons of pre- 
cision. The effort to prohibit all 
combinations, good or bad, is bound 
to fail, and ought to fail; when 
made, it merely means that some of 
the worst combinations are not 
checked and that honest business is 
checked. Our purpose should be, 
not to strangle business as an inci- 
dent of strangling combinations, but 
to regulate big corporations in 
thoroughgoing and effective fash- 
ion, so as to help legitimate business 
as an incident to thoroughly and 
completely safeguarding the inter- 
ests of the people as a_ whole. 
Against all such increase of Govern- 
mental regulation the argument is 
raised that it would amount to a 
form of Socialism. This argument 
is familiar; it is precisely the same 
as that which was raised against the 
creation of the Inter-State Com- 
merce Commission, and of all the 
different utilities commissions in the 
different States, as 1 myself saw, 
thirty years ago, when 1 was a leg- 
islator at Albany, and these ques- 
tions came up in connection with 
our State Government. Nor ean 
action be effectively taken by any 
one State. Congress alone hag 
power under the Constitution effec- 
tively and thoroughly and at all 
points to deal with inter-State com- 
merce, and where Congress, as it 
should do, provides laws that will 
give the Nation full jurisdiction 
over the whole field, then that juris- 
diction becomes, of necessity, ex- 
clusive— although until Congress 
does act affirmatively and_ thor- 
oughly it is idle to expect that the 
States will or ought to rest content 
with non-action on the part of both 
Federal and State authorities. This 
statement, by the way, applies also - 
to the question of ‘‘usurpation’’ by 
one branch of our Government of 
the rights of another branch. It is 
contended that in these recent de- 
cisions the Supreme Court legis- 
lated; so it did; and it had to; be- 
cause Congress had signally failed 
to do its duty by legislating. For 
the Supreme Court to nullify an act 
of the Legislature as unconstitu- 
tional except on the _ clearest 
grounds is usurpation; to interpret 
such an act in an obviously wrong 
sense is usurpation; but where the 
legislative body persistently leaves 
open a field which it is absolutely 
imperative, from the public stand- 
point, to fill, then no possible blame 
attaches to the official or officials 
who step in because they have to, 
and who then do the needed work in 
the interest of the people. The 
blame in such eases lies with the 
body which has been derelict, and 
not with the body which reluctantly 
makes good the dereliction. 
A quarter of a century ago, Sen- 
ator Cushman K. Davis, a statesman 
who amply deserved the title of 
statesman, a man of the highest 
courage, of the sternest adherence 
to the principles laid down by an ex- 
acting sense of duty, an unflinching 
believer in democracy, who was 
as little to be cowed by a mob as by 
a plutocrat, and moreover; a man 
who possessed the priceless gift of 
imagination, a gift as important to a 
statesman as to a historian, in an 
address delivered at the annual com- 
mencement of the University of 
Michigan on July 1, 1886, spoke as 
follows of corporations : 
(Concluded next week.) 
