should interact, are constantly arrayed one against the other, and the aggressions of the capitalists, who, through the medium of trusts and other devices, ruin their competitors and control prices, are confronted by the strong social forces made manifest in the close unions of labor, which find expression in frequent strikes and boycotts.
What, then, is the remedy? Various cures have been suggested, and, among others, some look to governmental control; but this would deprive us of aggressive individuality, in the same manner as the corporation has deprived us of the justice and honesty derived from natural trust and confidence. How may we retain the vigor and energy of individual push correlated with honesty and justice? Is it not plain that, with the restoration of personal liability, dishonest elements would scatter and their combinations dissolve?
It is asked, "What would then become of our great railway systems?" One thing is certain, although the impersonal corporation might vanish, the railways would remain, and there would be those to run them. If the persons united in the consolidated lines would trust each other (and if they will not, why should the public trust them?), such lines would continue as at present. If distrust should prevail, the Vanderbilts, for instance, might withdraw their capital from the West Shore, Michigan Central, Lake Shore, and other properties, and concentrate upon New York Central, leaving other capitalists to similarly withdraw from many properties, to concentrate and be responsible for one; and thus at one blow would be dissolved the mammoth consolidations which legislation has vainly aimed to check.
If, as would no doubt be threatened, our large manufacturing establishments should close, in a very short time the workmen would take possession, even as the liberated negro slave is now gradually becoming owner of the lands upon which he served in bondage. Trusts would scatter to the winds, for unfair and dishonest elements, no longer trusted by society, would prey upon each other, while the honest would withdraw, to unite among themselves. Material development might be retarded for a time, to make way for the moral growth essential to the proper conduct of industrial development. With this accomplished, cooperation would be an established institution, and the interests of capital and labor, now in constant conflict, would be united, and society would be rewarded by a resultant equal to the sum of their joint effects. Thus we have seen that in the industrial, no less than in the material, world action and reaction are opposite and equal, that force can neither be created nor destroyed, but, when it seems to disappear, it lives on, to reappear in new and equivalent effects.
