rld, that it was
folly to try to prohibit them, but that it was also folly to leave them
without thoroughgoing control. These men realized that the doctrine
of the old laissez faire economists, of the believers in unlimited
competition, unlimited individualism, were, in the actual state of
affairs, false and mischievous. They realized that the Government must
now interfere to protect labor, to subordinate the big corporation
to the public welfare, and to shackle cunning and fraud exactly as
centuries before it had interfered to shackle the physical force which
does wrong by violence. The big reactionaries of the business world and
their allies and instruments among politicians and newspaper editors
took advantage of this division of opinion, and especially of the fact
that most of their opponents were on the wrong path; and fought to
keep matters absolutely unchanged. These men demanded for themselves an
immunity from government control which, if granted, would have been as
wicked and as foolish as immunity to the barons of the twelfth century.
Many of them were evil men. Many others were just as good men as were
some of these same barons; but they were as utterly unable as any
medieval castle-owner to understand what the public interest really was.
There have been aristocracies which have played a great and beneficent
part at stages in the growth of mankind; but we had come to a stage
where for our people what was needed was a real democracy; and of all
forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny
of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy." *

* Autobiography (Scribner), pp. 424-25.

When Roosevelt became President, there were three directions in which
energy needed to be applied to the solution of the trust problem: in the
more vigorous enforcement of the laws already on the statute books; in
the enactment of necessary new laws on various phases of the subject;
and in the arousing of an intelligent and militant public opinion
in relation to the whole question. To each of these purposes the new
President applied himself with characteristic vigor.

The Sherman Anti-Trust law, which had already been on the Federal
statute books for eleven years, forbade "combinations in restraint
of trade" in the field of interstate commerce. During three
administrations, eighteen actions had been brought by the Government for
its enforcement. At the opening of the twentieth century it was a grave
qu