Jackson and Jefferson. There is but one objection to this plan. Somehow mankind has a habit of traveling forwards instead of backwards, and wherever a people have followed the advice of democracy and returned to the ways of their fathers, as happened in the case of the Egyptians, their posterity had to hire a German professor to decipher the inscription on their tombstone.
The trust, after all, is not an invention of the devil, as some "statesmen" believe, but the product of industrial evolution. Competition may be the life of trade, but it is also the mother of monopoly. In the competitive struggle, only the fit survive. The fit in this case are those who succeed in getting the most value for the least expenditure. This is usually accomplished through the reduction of wages, the employment of children, adulteration, mis-representation, state paternalism as exemplified in the high tariff policy, freight rate manipulation, rebating, stock watering and the installation of more and bigger machinery than the competitor is able to command.
The trust was born when Brown and Smith, competitors in the same territory, got sick of hammering each other and formed a partnership to hammer the dear public. No one should blame them for trying to make money. Soon Brown and Smith came in competition with the firm of Mueller and Jones, and knowing a few things about the blessings of competition, they merged the two concerns into a stock company.
The Brown-Smith Mfg. Co. soon discovered that Harry Dick and Co. were selling the same goods in the same market for less money. Consolidation followed as the only means to protect profits. Partnerships, Stock Companies, Corporations, Syndicates, Holding Companies and
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