Trusts, have but one aim, the elimination of competition. Those who had sense enough to combine, survived; those who didn't were left behind. To go back to competition would be as rational as sitting on an oak tree in the hope of squeezing it back into the acorn, or of coaxing a rooster to return into the egg.
During the Democratic convention in Denver, proceedings dragged along until Friday morning at three o’clock, when the time arrived to nominate a candidate for president. As everybody knows, Friday is an unlucky day. Democracy should not jeopardize its brilliant prospects by nominating a candidate on Friday. Whereupon the cunning gentlemen turned the clock in the convention hall from Friday morning at 3 o'clock back to Thursday night at 11 o'clock. But while the Democratic Party may be able to turn back the hands of a helpless clock, it is still unable to turn back the wheels of progress.
Social Ownership.
Trust control having failed, returning to competition and to the happy days of Jackson and Jefferson, being an impossibility, what other solution is there then for the trust question? Socialists say, the trust is a good thing and a bad thing. It is a good thing for all the fellows on the inside and a bad thing for all the people on the outside. If we should ask Rockefeller what he thinks of the trust, he would tell us candidly that it is the best money making machine he ever tumbled into, but the people who buy the products of that money machine, hold an entirely different opinion.
A trust is like an automobile. Tho chase down the pike and to see some old farmer climb a barbed wire fence behind a pair of runaway
8
