business. You can sometimes do something large when it isn't watching, but
when it is watching, you can't do much. And I have seen men squeezed by
it; I have seen men who, as they themselves expressed it, were put "out of
business by Wall Street," because Wall Street found them inconvenient and
didn't want their competition.

Let me say again that I am not impugning the motives of the men in Wall
Street. They may think that that is the best way to create prosperity for
the country. When you have got the market in your hand, does honesty
oblige you to turn the palm upside down and empty it? If you have got the
market in your hand and believe that you understand the interest of the
country better than anybody else, is it patriotic to let it go? I can
imagine them using this argument to themselves.

The dominating danger in this land is not the existence of great
individual combinations,--that is dangerous enough in all conscience,--but
the combination of the combinations,--of the railways, the manufacturing
enterprises, the great mining projects, the great enterprises for the
development of the natural water-powers of the country, threaded together
in the personnel of a series of boards of directors into a "community of
interest" more formidable than any conceivable single combination that
dare appear in the open.

The organization of business has become more centralized, vastly more
centralized, than the political organization of the country itself.
Corporations have come to cover greater areas than states; have come to
live under a greater variety of laws than the citizen himself, have
excelled states in their budgets and loomed bigger than whole
commonwealths in their influence over the lives and fortunes of entire
communities of men. Centralized business has built up vast structures of
organization and equipment which overtop all states and seem to have no
match or competitor except the federal government itself.

What we have got to do,--and it is a colossal task not to be undertaken
with a light head or without judgment,--what we have got to do is to
disentangle this colossal "community of interest." No matter how we may
purpose dealing with a single combination in restraint of trade, you will
agree with me in this, that no single, avowed, combination is big enough
for the United States to be afraid of; but when all the combinations are
combined and this final combination is not disclosed by any process of
inco