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The Green Bag
dent to thoroughly and completely safeguarding the interests of the people as a whole. . . . "This nation should definitely adopt the policy of attacking, not the mere fact of combination, but the evils and wrongdoing which so frequently accom pany combination. The fact that a combination is very big is ample reason for exercising a close and jealous super vision over it, because its size renders it potent for mischief; but it should not be punished unless it actually does the mischief; it should merely be so supervised and controlled as to guarantee us, the people, against its doing mischief. We should not strive for a policy of unregulated competition and of the destruction of all big corpora tions, that is, of all the most efficient business industries in the land. Nor should we persevere in the hopeless experiment of trying to regulate these industries by means only of lawsuits, each lasting several years, and of uncer tain result. We should enter upon a course of supervision, control, and regu lation of these great corporations — a regulation which we should not fear, if necessary, to bring to the point of con trol of monopoly prices, just as in excep tional cases railway rates are now reg ulated." Mr. Roosevelt suggested that the first and most elementary kind of a square deal to give the man engaged in big business, who honestly desires to do right, is to give him in advance full information as to just what he can, and what he cannot legally and properly do. The present uncertainty of the law has had a paralyzing and demoralizing effect upon business. William Jennings Bryan, in a news paper interview granted before' his departure for Jamaica, dissented from Colonel Roosevelt's plan for the regu
lation of trusts by a commission. Such a commission, he said, rested on a dan gerous theory — that competition is impossible in large business enterprises. This is the socialistic theory, he said. "The Democratic position, as I under stand it, is that competition is not only desirable, but essential. The Demo cratic plan is to limit the percentage of control so as to secure competition. I need hardly add that I favor the Demo cratic platform in this respect. I be lieve that the limit should be set so that corporations should not control more than fifty per cent of their power." In an article published in the New York Times, Colonel Bryan said further: "Federal regulation is not a complete remedy. The influence exerted by monopolies is so great that the people would be in a constant battle with the great corporations to see which would elect officials through whom control would be exercised; and no one who has watched these decisions can fail to recognize the helplessness of the masses when they have to fight a vigilant, sleepless group of financiers who have a large pecuniary stake in controlling the government. "The larger the control vested in the national commission or court the more important it would be for the trusts to control the selection of the members. If the court was intrusted with the fix ing of prices it would mean hundreds of millions a year to the trusts." This is unconvincing and in a charac teristic vein of invective against wealth, whatever form it may assume. More weighty views have been expressed in a timely series of articles in the New York Times written by a number of leading business men. The significant thing about these articles is their sin cerity and breadth of view; they are written, not to advance any special inter
