THE SHERMAN LAW
The Money Trust cannot be broken, if we allow its power to be constantly augmented. To break the Money Trust, we must stop that power at its source. The industrial trusts are among its most effective feeders. Those which are illegal should be dissolved. The creation of new ones should be prevented. To this end the Sherman Law should be supplemented both by providing more efficient judicial machinery, and by creating a commission with administrative functions to aid in enforcing the law. When that is done, another step will have been taken toward securing the New Freedom. But restrictive legislation alone will not suffice. We should bear in mind the admonition with which the Commissioner of Corporations closes his review of our water power development:
“There is ... presented such a situation in water powers and other public utilities as might bring about at any time under a single management the control of a majority of the developed water power in the United States and similar control over the public utilities in a vast number of cities and towns, including some of the most important in the country.”
We should conserve all rights which the Federal Government and the States now have in our natural resources, and there should be a complete separation of our industries from railroads and public utilities.
CHAPTER VIII
A CURSE OF BIGNESS
Bigness has been an important factor in the rise of the Money Trust: Big railroad systems, Big industrial trusts, Big public service companies; and as instruments of these Big banks and Big trust companies. J. P. Morgan & Co. (in their letter of defence to the Pujo Committee) urge the needs of Big Business as the justification for financial concentration. They declare that what they euphemistically call “coöperation” is “simply a further result of the necessity for handling great transactions”; that “the country obviously requires not only the larger individual banks, but demands also that those banks shall coöperate to perform efficiently the country’s business”; and that “a step backward along this line would mean a halt in industrial progress that would affect every wage-earner from the Atlantic to the Pacific.” The phrase “great transactions” is used by the bankers apparently as meaning large corporate security issues.
Leading bankers have undoubtedly coöperated during the last 15 years in floating some very large security issues, as well as many small ones. But relatively few large issues were made necessary by great improvements undertaken or by industrial development. Improvements and development ordinarily proceed slowly. For them, even where the enterprise involves large expenditures, a series of smaller issues is usually more appropriate than single large ones. This is particularly true in the East where the building of new railroads has practically ceased. The “great” security issues in which bankers have coöperated were, with relatively few exceptions, made either for the purpose of effecting combinations or as a consequence of such combinations. Furthermore, the combinations which made necessary these large security issues or underwritings were, in most cases, either contrary to existing statute law, or contrary to laws recommended by the Interstate Commerce Commission, or contrary to the laws of business efficiency. So both the financial concentration and the combinations which they have served were, in the main, against the public interest. Size, we are told, is not a crime. But size may, at least, become noxious by reason of the means through which it was attained or the uses to which it is put. And it is size attained by combination, instead of natural growth, which has contributed so largely to our financial concentration. Let us examine a few cases: