these men are, from the standpoint of the
people at large, unfit to be trusted with the power implied in the
management of a large corporation. But nothing of importance is
gained by breaking up a huge inter-State and international industrial
organization _which has not offended otherwise than by its size_, into
a number of small concerns without any attempt to regulate the way in
which those concerns as a whole shall do business. Nothing is gained by
depriving the American Nation of good weapons wherewith to fight in the
great field of international industrial competition. Those who would
seek to restore the days of unlimited and uncontrolled competition, and
who believe that a panacea for our industrial and economic ills is to
be found in the mere breaking up of all big corporations, simply because
they are big, are attempting not only the impossible, but what, if
possible, would be undesirable. They are acting as we should act if
we tried to dam the Mississippi, to stop its flow outright. The effort
would be certain to result in failure and disaster; we would have
attempted the impossible, and so would have achieved nothing, or worse
than nothing. But by building levees along the Mississippi, not seeking
to dam the stream, but to control it, we are able to achieve our object
and to confer inestimable good in the course of so doing.

This Nation should definitely adopt the policy of attacking, not
the mere fact of combination, but the evils and wrong-doing which so
frequently accompany combination. The fact that a combination is very
big is ample reason for exercising a close and jealous supervision over
it, because its size renders it potent for mischief; but it should not
be punished unless it actually does the mischief; it should merely be
so supervised and controlled as to guarantee us, the people, against
its doing mischief. We should not strive for a policy of unregulated
competition and of the destruction of all big corporations, that is, of
all the most efficient business industries in the land. Nor should
we persevere in the hopeless experiment of trying to regulate these
industries by means only of lawsuits, each lasting several years, and of
uncertain result. We should enter upon a course of supervision, control,
and regulation of these great corporations--a regulation which we should
not fear, if necessary, to bring to the point of control of monopoly
prices, just as in exceptional cases railway rates are