ing such combinations by legal enactment, on the supposition, presumably, that it is possible and desirable to return to the simpler systems of the past. Our development as an industrial state is the result of trade conditions and opportunities which no legislative power could anticipate or control. Even those charged with the management of great enterprises are seemingly powerless, and appear to be urged on by some unseen and irresistible force, and yet an influence which makes for better condi tions. While this question is distinctly an economic one, the indications now are that it will be given political significance. The peculiar feature about this phase of the case is the attitude of certain party leaders who, in the national contest of 1896, ascribed the horrors of that period to low prices. Men who had formerly favored free trade as a means of reducing prices became the most vigorous advocates of free silver, claiming that unlimited coinage would immediately enhance values. In the confusion of theories the wonder is that more people were not deceived. The past two years have been noted for exceptional activity in all industrial and commercial lines. Great organizations have been formed for carrying on the growing business of the country. During this period the wages of workingmen have been increased and the hours of labor shortened. The application of sound principles in governmental affairs has aided in placing increased comforts within the reach of every wageworker in the land. In many departments of industry there is a scarcity of labor. Yet in the face of these encouraging indications and they present the appearance of permanency-we are asked by certain discontented disciples to believe that the method of the new business era constitutes the greatest danger that confronts our republic.. This class of industrial pessimists have put upon their fear and fancy the duty of destroying their judgment. "Imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, A local habitation and a name. Much of the public feeling against so-called trusts is the result of misconception. Certain people have been educated to think that the combination of capital, like the organization of labor, is to consummate the schemes of plunder and oppression. This opinion not only reflects unjustly upon our motives as civilized beings, but it has arrayed against it all the laws of trade. It is impossible for any combination of employers to perma nently fix the price of any product where the field is open to face competition. The only sense in which a trust could be maintained is where, by reason of greater economy in production, the product is placed upon the market at a price so low that others would have no inducement to compete. Against this form of "price fixing" the people who consume would certainly have no reason to complain. In spite of all our prejudices, has this not been the tendency? When the great railroads organized years ago the apprehension prevailed that rates would be advanced, and the calamity prophets of that day, like the present, were painfully realistic in describing the fate that was to destroy us. Transportation charges for freight are less by two-thirds now than they were prior to the organization, with a corresponding improvement in the service. The independent refiners of petroleum will unite in declaring the Standard Oil Company a monopoly, and yet it cannot be disputed that it was powerless to maintain prices. The reports show that the wholesale export price of oil has declined from 25 cents per gallon in 1871, to less than 6 cents in 1899. The people are getting a better article for nearly one-fifth the former cost; changes in the process of refining have saved the people millions of dollars, without, it is fair to presume, impairing the profits of the company. The oil and railroad interests of the country have been singu larly free from labor disturbances. As a matter of recent history, our most serious conflicts have been with interests that neglected to federate. Labor leaders will agree that better terms of employment can, as a rule, be obtained from large than from small employers. Why, then, should we fear the results of consolidation? It is the part of reason to encourage a tendency that will make possible higher wages, lower prices, and less hours of labor. Workingmen who will be expected to join the crusade against so-called trusts should have a care lest they become the victims of designing demagogues who would invoke the law to punish those who favor the restrictions which labor unions impose. M. L. LOCKWOOD. President American Anti-Trust League. M. L. Lockwood, president of the American Anti-Trust League, spoke on the subject of "Property Rights and Human Rights," saying: We are confronted by great questions, greater, I feel, than have ever confronted any generation of men. Slowly and by tortuous route man has pulled himself up to the present stage of civilization, and we now live in the most important age of all the centuries; in an age in which the capability of this man for selfgovernment will be put to a new test, tested in that crucible of absolute unlimited supply of corrupt corporate money in our public life. Absolute unlimited corrupt money, because if they may be allowed to destroy competition and plunder the people, the trusts and monopolies and railroad combines can afford to make it absolutely unlimited. From a money standpoint it will pay them. We live in an age of the most marvelous development, in an age in which man has come nearer to unlocking the secrets of nature than ever before, in an age in which he has harnessed, blocked and unloosed the lightning and has invented labor-saving machinery so perfect in its mechanism that it can almost think and actually talk. Man has more than doubled his power to produce. He has invented compressed air drills that can strike five hundred blows a minute, when he could once strike only twenty-five a minute. And yet corporations have claimed it all. Corporations say, "This is ours." "That the marvelous inventive genius of man in the creation and production of labor-saving machinery shall not lighten the burden of man at all." Yes, and when multiplicity of factories create competition for man's labor and competition developed in the supplies to man so that he was commencing to realize a benefit, then corporations further combined created trusts and monopolies, destroyed competition, combined to force man to become a cog, a commodity, a serf to their grind for money. And when with the help of the compressed air drill and with steam and electric power it had become possible for man to mine enough of the precious metals with which to pay his honest debts in the coin of the contract and walk uprightly and free of debt, then the shylocks of the world in secret and by corrupt means demonetized one of the precious metals, thereby doubling the value and purchasing power of the other, chaining man to the rock a more helpless slave to debt. My friends, do you recognize that under this system of monopolies and trusts that all of man's inventive genius and marvelous creation and production of labor-saving machinery has only heaped on him a heavier burden, that a few by the organization of trusts and monopolies are becoming multi-millionaires, while the burden upon the back of man is becoming heavier and heavier for him to bear? Do you recognize that these great captains of monopoly and finance under this system to-day are absorbing all the wealth produced by the people: and more, that they are annually absorbing a part of the accumulated wealth of the nation? Do you recognize that annually tenant farmers in America are increasing by thousands; that the property of this great nation is slowly but surely being concentrated in a few hands, the rock upon which old Rome and Greece and Carthage were wrecked? Is there no way to call a halt and turn back from this road to ruin? To-day we have men with fine-spun theories telling of the advantages of trust combinations, telling us that trusts and monopolies can lop off here and lop off there and make more money. Money everything! Man nothing! My friends, they have gone money mad. Can it be possible that man, man made in the likeness of God, has become so cheap that he shall be ground under this juggernaut of monopolies and trusts that a few may become rich in money, rich in millions that have already become a curse on their hands, a curse to their sons and to their daughters, a hindrance to the development of that kind of noble manhood and womanhood of which they and the republic may justly be proud? My friends, we are confronted to-day by two great forces, property rights and human rights. And now when property rights assume the new relations of perpetual corporate ownership, an entail, without human heart or human conscience behind it, what is its power for evil? We eulogize Jefferson for his delivering us from the curse of propinquity and entail, and we find ourselves now in the grip of a greater monster. England charged the old East India Company four hundred thousand pounds, two millions of dollars, annually, for the right to plunder the people of India; and they would only give fifteen years at a time, at that. But this great republic of ours gives the Standard Oil Company, the Sugar Trust, the Big Four Beef Combine, and the rest of these little trusts the perpetual right to plunder the producers and consumers of America, and doesn't charge them a cent. If the Standard Oil trust could be secure in the monopoly they now have, they could well afford to pay the government thirty millions of dollars annually for the privilege, and cheap at that. And here I must digress for a moment. I was somewhat surprised last evening to hear a gentleman upon this floor tell an American audience that Russia had put a protective tax of $2 a barrel on oil to keep American oil from driving the Russian oil out of Russian markets, and in the very next moment he tells us that if it had not been for the organizing genius of the Standard Oil Company people that Russian oil would have flooded the American markets and dried up the American oil wells and shut down American refineries. Now that is spreading it on pretty thick-thicker than I have been used to, and I have been used to a good deal. The gentleman would have us believe that the Standard Oil Company have a monopoly of the brain and business capacity of America, but I want to tell the gentleman and you that if it had not been for railway rebates and discriminations that there would never have been a Standard Oil trust monopoly. I want to say to the gentleman and to you that if he will re-establish and maintain equal rates over the railways of America (that in spite of this legitimate evolution of business that we hear so much about), that the energy, enterprise, courage and business capacity of the American people will drive the Standard Oil Company, with its extravagant methods, into a secondary position in the oil trade of America in less than ten years. Oh, but they say that that would be waste, that that wouldn't be evolution of business, that that would be competition, but I want to say to you, my friends, that competition is a good thing for the people and a bad thing for monopoly. Yes, we are confronted by two great forces, property right and human right, for the last two hundred and fifty years. For the last two hundred and fifty years whenever property rights have encroached upon the rights of man, man has moved onward. He came to America. Along the Atlantic coast for the last one hundred and twenty-five years, when property rights have encroached upon man, the brave and the true went west, and they have gone on and on until they can go no farther. And they have turned back, and to-day property rights and human rights. have met upon the highway and are combatting for the mastery. The echoes of dynamite from Shoshone County, Idaho, from Cleveland, Ohio, and from Brooklyn, New York, admonish us that the battle is on. It is not of our choosing, but the battle is on. My friends, do you recognize the gravity of the situation? |