under his personal direction must be separately examined; but it is important to recognize that it was no isolated measure, but an integral part of a comprehensive and deliberately concerted programme for the emancipation of the people from the fetters imposed by great commercial and financial interests. In the execution of that programme measures for corporation control and currency reform stood out side by side with tariff revision among a number of minor Bills directed to the same general end.

There was no question of the urgency of the need for reform along all these lines. Republican administration, with the high Protection that formed a permanent plank in the party platform, had been the almost unbroken rule since the Civil War, and behind the shelter of a tariff wall there had grown up great industrial combinations that were rapidly achieving, and in some branches of trade had already achieved, a nation-wide monopoly. "The protective tariff "-to quote the President's own words-" has been taken advantage of by some men to destroy domestic comto combine all existing rivals within our free-trade area, and to make it impossible for new men to come into the field." The main

object of a trust tended to be, not to serve the public, but to throttle competition and use the resulting monopoly to force up prices and inflate profits.

That process involved two main stages, the first being the absorption or consolidation of existing concerns, the second the resolute exclu

sion of every new competitor attempting to measure himself against the trust in the areain some cases co-extensive with the Union itself -marked out for its operations. The mania for the consolidation of competing companies was at its height in the closing years of the nineteenth century. "In the single year 1899," writes Professor H. C. Emery, of Yale, "the nominal capital of newly formed combinations reached a total of $3,500,000,000,000, of which, however, more than three-quarters represented the capital of the reorganized companies. In the following year the United States Steel Company was organized with a capital of $1,100,000,000, besides a bonded indebtedness of $300,000,000. If a

single corporation to control the vast iron and steel business of the country could be successfully established, there seerned, indeed, no limit to the process of consolidation."

These developments had a sinister political side. It was essential that the great combinations should retain a free hand for their operations by keeping Congress, and still more the State legislatures, under their control. "Control" is perhaps too strong a term to apply to the subterranean intrigues at Washington by which powerful trusts were able to secure that Bills adverse to their interests were never reported out of Committee, or that duties by which they were sheltered were never lowered a point in a tariff revision. But it is not at all too strong to apply to the handling of State Legislatures by corporations. For a great

Cambridge Modern History, vol. vii, chap. xxii.

railway to command the machine of the dominant party in a State served by its system was a commonplace of American politics. The Pennsylvania Railroad in New Jersey and the Southern Pacific in California were cases in point.

A corporation knows no politics, in the sense that it is indifferent which party it uses to secure its ends. If the Republicans are in the ascendant it will use the Republicans, if the Democrats the Democrats. It will retain counsel whose functions are exercised more largely in the lobby of the Legislature than in the law-courts; it will keep the party campaign chest well stocked; it will maintain permanent and effective understandings with the local bosses; its advertising gives it a hold over the more influential newspapers; and a generous but judicious allocation of free passes to editors, politicians, and State officials secures a freedom from interference with "legitimate and beneficial industry" advantageous to directors and shareholders if not to the general public. Some of these practices are now forbidden by State or Federal legislation, but it needs little ingenuity to circumvent the veto, and where it cannot be circumvented it can often be ignored without serious consequences. The result of such corporation rule is that the railroad can always count on the Legislature to refuse authorization for the construction of competitive lines, and on the executive to turn a blind eye to the varying of freight rates from the schedules set out in the railroad's charter, to the substitution of dangerous level crossings for

expensive bridges and embankments, or to the curtailment or inefficiency of stipulated services.

Commercial domination of this character has for a generation been vitiating the political life of the Union. It finds one manifestation in the lobbying of the great industrial interests when a Tariff Bill is before Congress, and another in the extensive interlocking of directorships. What that means is seen on a small scale when half the members of the board of an inter-State railway are at the same time directors of a local lumber company or steel foundry seeking special freight rates from the railroad. It is seen on a national scale when the directorates of the great combines -oil or steel or railroads-have sufficient hold over the financial houses, as they usually have through the interlocking of the directorships, to close the market to potential trade rivals in need of a loan. A Money Trust is as real and as serious a peril as an industrial trust. The extent of the identity of interests between the financiers and the leaders of industry may be gauged by the fact that in 1914, after the report of a Congressional Committee on money combines, the members of the great financial house of Morgan resigned thirty directorships of railroad and other companies, including the New York Central and other Vanderbilt lines, the Western Union Telegraph Company, the United States Steel Corporation, the Guaranty and other trust companies, and the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company.

The intimacy of the relationship between in

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dustry and transport was emphasized by Mr. Wilson himself. When you reflect," he pointed out, "that the twenty-four men who control the United States Steel Corporation are either presidents or vice-presidents or directors in 55 per cent. of the railways of the United States, you know just how close the whole thing is knitted together in our industrial system, and how great the temptation is.”

These evils had not grown to maturity unchallenged. Almost every session of Congress. had seen the passage of legislation directed towards the restriction of the power of the combines. Both Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Taft had invoked the existing Anti-Trust Laws with effect, and many combines and rings had been broken up. But there were grave difficulties in the way. The United States lives under a double legal system, State and Federal, and the conflict of jurisdiction between the courts gave the combines, particularly where they were operating in several States with different laws, opportunities of immunity of which they were sufficiently astute to take full advantage. The Democratic platform of 1912 was basing its judgment on a sinister record of unsuccessful anti-trust litigation when it insisted, in language curiously picturesque for a political manifesto, that there must be "no twilight zone between the nation and the State in which exploiting interests can take refuge from both."

It is superfluous to enlarge on Mr. Wilson's The New Freedom, chap. viii.