the law does not fit actual present-day conditions. This is partly
because many of the trusts were organized with full knowledge that they
involved a violation of law but in the belief that the law could not or
would not be effectively enforced. The realization that this belief was
mistaken has thrown a good many people into a state of very genuine
bewilderment, but it is an uncertainty, not as to what is firm ground,
but as to how to get out of a bog, once having gotten in. For the most
part, however, the general feeling of insecurity is due not so much to
having knowingly overstepped the law, as to a change in economic
conditions. The spirit of the time is one of cooeperation and
combination. It is manifested in the churches and colleges as well as in
the marketplace. In the industrial arena, the tendency has been
intensified by the invention of new machines and the resulting
aggregations of fixed capital in forms designed for particular uses and
incapable of diversion into other channels. Such rules of the common or
customary law as were the outgrowth of an era of mobile capital and free
competition no longer fit the conditions under which we are living.

In a conflict between economic forces and legal enactment there can
finally be but one outcome. The law must sooner or later adapt itself to
life conditions. The real problem to-day is--how shall this adaptation
be accomplished; how can statutes be framed which shall check abuses
without falling under the wheels of social progress? Right here a swarm
of half-informed theorizers are rushing in where trained economists fear
to tread. It is difficult and dangerous ground, but there is at least
one measure of legal reform--take away the right of one corporation to
hold stock in another--which might be urged with confidence were it not
for the existence of sundry oppressive and conflicting state laws.

The abolition by law of the holding-company device is no new suggestion.
It was strongly urged years ago by the late Edward B. Whitney. It was
the keystone of the famous "Seven Sisters" statutes,[1] enacted with
loud acclaim in New Jersey at the behest of Governor Woodrow Wilson (but
subsequently repealed and thrown into the discard). Such a measure would
be more effective and far-reaching than the public supposes. Nearly all
the so-called trusts have been organized and are being held together in
whole or in part, by the holding-company device. In many cases this has
been