THE TRUST PROBLEM RESTUDIED 63
Any attempt to maintain either must end in failure The fashion of
trusts has but a short season longer to run, and then some other equally vain device may be expected to appear when the next period of depression arrives; but there is not the slightest danger that serious injury can result to the sound principles of business from any or all of these movements. The only people who have reason to fear trusts are those foolish enough to enter into them. The consumer and the transporter, not the manufacturer and the railway owner, are to reap the harvest.
This is a plea for a let-alone policy. If the consumer not only suffers no injury, but is positively benefited by the "folly" of trust organizers, it clearly follows that, so far as his interests are concerned, anti-trust legislation is entirely superfluous. But Mr. Carnegie qualifies his statement by adding that trusts are harmless to consumers "so long as all are free to compete." This, construed in a certain way, might be very material, but Mr. Carnegie evidently attaches no special meaning to the phrase. He advises the American people "to hold firmly to the doctrine of free competition," and to "keep the field open;" but as he, in the same breath, expresses the conviction that this freedom of competition the American people are not likely to surrender, the implication is that we have now all the freedom, all the competition that we need by way of protection against monopoly and its abuses in other words, that there is nothing to do, or to undo, with reference to the trust phenomena. If this be true, the statutes for the prevention or dissolution or punishment of combinations are without utility or raison d'etre.
Now, on what facts is Mr. Carnegie's optimism based ? He, and those who agree with him, cannot be charged with taking too short a view upon the subject, but it is possible to take too long a view. To say that certain things will happen in the long run is not to say that the meantime will be entirely free from hardship, confusion, and injustice. Grant that, even with the amount of competition now existing, monopoly is impossible as a permanent evil, does it follow that the temporary success of monopoly is a trivial matter, deserving of no attention from the legislature ? By no means. And this is a fallacy of which Mr. Carnegie, Mr. James J. Hill, and other irrepressible opti- mists are easily convicted. They see that certain mismanaged
