COÖPERATION AND CONTROL
January 8, 1918
The assumption of control by the Government over the railroads was certainly necessary. Exactly how far it will go is not evident. At present what has been done is merely to introduce government supervision and control over railroads which are required to combine their operations in flat defiance Of the Sherman Law. In other words, the Government has wisely abandoned the effort to enforce competition among the railroads and has introduced the principle of control over corporative organizations.
The Attorney-General has just announced that he will, for the time being, abandon the suits under the Sherman Law to break up the harvester and steel corporations, because it is not wise to do so during the war. Mr. Culbertson, the able expert on the government tariff board, has announced that the Sherman Law is mischievous in international trade. Mr. Francis Heney, than whom in all the country there is no more determined and efficient enemy of wrongdoing corporations, has stated that the Sherman Law, the so-called Anti-Trust Law, is mischievous in our domestic business and should be repealed. In other words, under the strain of the war the Sherman Law has completely broken down and the Government is not merely conniving at, but encouraging, its violation by many different corporations.
The Sherman Law, or so-called Anti-Trust Law, is just as mischievous in peace as in war. It represents an effort to meet a great evil in the wrong way. As long as corporations claimed complete immunity from government control, the first necessity was to establish the right of the Government to control them. This right and power of the Government was established by the Northern Securities suit, which prevented all the railroads of the country from being united under one corporation which defied government control. The suits against the Standard Oil and Tobacco trusts followed. The Supreme Court decreed that the trusts had been guilty of grave misconduct and should be dissolved, but not a particle of good followed their dissolution. It is evident that the Sherman Law, or so-called Anti-Trust Law, in no way meets the evils of the industrial world. To try to break up corporations because they are big and efficient is either ineffective or mischievous. What is needed is to exercise government control over them, so as to encourage their efficiency and prosperity, but to insure that the efficiency is used in the public interest and that the prosperity is properly passed around.
Merely to repeal the Sherman Law without putting anything in its place would do harm. It should at once be amended or superseded by a law which would in some shape permit and require the issuing of licenses by the Federal Government to corporations doing an interstate or international business. Corporations which did not take out such licenses or comply with the rules of the Government’s administrative board would be subject to the Sherman Law. The others would be under government control and would be encouraged to coöperate and in every way to become prosperous and efficient, the Government guaranteeing by its supervision that the corporations’ prosperity and efficiency were in the public interest.