n that
they now enjoy. The number of such industries as this is comparatively
small. In the case of the great majority of our duties there is one
part that protects the industry as such and another part that protects
the monopoly within it. Throw off the whole duty, and you expose the
independent rivals of the trust, as well as the trust itself, to a
foreign competition which they are hardly able to bear; but if you
throw off a part of the duty,--the part which serves to create the
monopoly,--you do not destroy and probably do not hurt the independent
producer. His position now is abnormal and perilous. He may be
continuing solely by grace of a power that could crush him any day if
it would, and its power to crush him is due to the great gains which
its position as a monopoly affords. When it wishes to crush a local
rival, it can enter his territory and, within that area, sell goods
for less than it costs to make them; and, while pursuing this
cut-throat policy, it can still make money, because it is getting high
prices in the other parts of its extensive territory. With no such
great general returns to draw on as a war fund, the trust would have
to compete with its rivals on terms which would be at least more
nearly even than they now are. It would still have weapons which it
could employ against competitors, and its capacity for fighting
unfairly would not be exhausted. Without further action on the part of
lawmakers the position of a small rival of a trust might be
unnaturally dangerous; but an essential point is that one means which
the trust adopts in order to crush him depends on the existence of
great profits in most of its territory; and these would not exist if
it were not for the unnecessary and abnormal part of the duty.

The trust wants its duty, and it wants the whole of it. It is the
perennial defender of the policy which is termed "standing pat." It
values the monopoly-making part according to the measure of the
profits which that part brings into its coffers. The trust is
powerful, as we do not need to be told, and it will find ways of
thwarting tariff reduction as it does other anti-trust legislation.
Drastic laws forced through legislatures or Congress during
ebullitions of popular wrath--laws which demand so much in the way of
trust breaking that they will never be enforced and never ought to
be--have not, thus far, been prevented. Such "bulls against the comet"
have been issued frequently enough, bu