sugar trust. Of course it is time that on high moral grounds. somebody should appear to advocate this new doctrine of social existence. The new order of things needs a champion if they are to continue and revolution be avoided.

Mr. President, there has never from the day of our independence been a time, until recently, when a genuine American citizen did not resent the imputation of being a poor man, even if he did not have a dollar in his pocket. He is rich in his inheritance of religious and political liberty, rich in his confidence of manhood, and he was rich in opportunities to acquire wealth until deprived of them by legislation in the interest of corporate trusts and monopolies and of the manipulators of the world's standard of values, who aimed to prevent the masses from rising above the condition of poverty in order that their own accumulations might acquire greater value.

The time has not yet come when the American people will permit the plea of poverty to be entered in their behalf by trust magnates as an argument in favor of the continuance of trust methods. The same assertions that are made in behalf of the trusts might be repeated with equal force in favor of the establishment of a monarchy and the creation of orders of nobility, to be composed of the individuals who are so fond of prating about their regard for the welfare of the "poor people."

All that the American people want for themselves is a fair field and no favor. In business, as well as in politics, they believe that they can govern themselves better than any selfconstituted dictators can govern them. The history of the American people demonstrates that this belief is well founded. One State after another, in obedience to the will of the people, has declared unlawful all trusts and combinations in restraint of trade.

The Congress of the United States so declared seven years ago by the passage of the act of June, 1890, which was Senate bill No. 1 of the Fifty-first Congress. The Supreme Court only recently affirmed the application of that act to combinations among railroad corporations. It remains for this Congress to enforce the provisions of the antitrust act of 1890

by providing an efficient penalty for its violation through the adoption of the amendment to the tariff act which I have proposed.

The future may develop that even this remedy may not avail, and that other remedies are required to be tried, but it seems to me that this remedy will be most effective and ef ficient, for I do not believe that the trusts in this country will undertake to continue, and thus deprive themselves of the exclusive control of the American market; but if this remedy does not avail, there have been many suggestions upon this subject, and I will briefly note two or three of them.

It has been suggested, first, that absolute publicity of ac counts under Government control and audit must be insisted upon, as is coming to be done in a feeble way by railroads. This is the view of two eminent students of the problem, Prof. Henry C. Adams, of the University of Michigan, statistician of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and by Von Halle. in a work on Trusts, published by Macmillan & Co. in 1895.

It is the interesting suggestion of Professor Jenks, of Cornell University, that stock exchanges should not be allowed to list any of the securities of capitalistic monopolies without publishing most complete and sworn returns of the cost of construction, of capitalization, cost of products, etc., and that no stock shall be issued in excess of the actual investment.

The prohibition of factors' agreements. The New York Senate trust committee, in its valuable report (obtainable, probably, from the secretary of state of New York), fully describes, on pages 22-25, inclusive, these agreements.

The control by a national commission of maximum charges, and the prohibition, some way, of discrimination in charges in towns or counties contiguous to each other. That is, it might be possible to prevent a trust from charging more in one place than in another except by the amount of the difference of freight rates. One of the great weapons of the Standard Oil and the meat trusts is to ruin competitors by reducing the rates in a place below what the same company is charging in neighboring places.

There comes to my mind in this connection a very inter

esting illustration. In Colorado there are oil wells. Petroleum exists there in inexhaustible quantities and of excellent quality. An oil refinery was constructed at a cost of $2,000,000. That company was engaged in supplying that country with oil, when one day the Standard Oil Company began business in Pueblo and in other towns in Colorado, and sold oil at 5 cents a gallon until they wrecked and ruined the Colorado refinery and closed its doors.

The day after that was done the Standard Oil Company raised the price of their oil to 25 cents a gallon and continued to sell it at that price until they had made an immense profit and recouped the loss they had previously sustained, and to-day they charge 20 cents a gallon for their oil. In my own town an independent oil company began selling oil, and it was selling it at 8 cents a gallon, for the trust had put it down to that price, and yet the independent company was able to live and did live and continued for two years of time.

Finally one day they sold out to the trust; and from that day to this we have been paying 16 cents a gallon for oil. It is argued that we can not protect ourselves against these things. Certainly, Mr. President, if we can not, our institutions totter to a fall. What is this but socialism in the most odious form? If these remedies fail, we must resort, unless others are found, to the last remedy, that of public ownership.

This may take the form of public ownership of such natural sources of supply as anthracite coal mines and oil wells, or possibly the leasing of their operation to private companies; or it may take the form of public ownership and operation of all industries that have become practical monopolies. This remedy begins to loom up as a distant possibility, but is ast yet too remote a contingency to come within the domain of practical politics. But of one thing we can rest assured, socialism is preferable to despotism, and the right of each citizen to enjoy the products of his toil must be maintained if we are to maintain our institutions.

Mr. President, the history of the past teaches this lesson. Shall we follow the course of all other peoples in the past, or shall we begin a new era? When was it that Rome was de

stroyed? When the original landed proprietors became paupers; when her farms became great estates. In the days of Cincinnatus 12 acres sufficed for each family; farms of 12 acres, owned by freemen, surrounded the walls of Rome, and no hostile legions could reach the city. When Rome fell, the individual proprietor was gone; the usurer had taken the land; the Roman citizen had been sold into slavery, and was toiling as a slave upon the estate of a part of which he was once the proud owner.

The legions of Goths and Vandals that marched to the walls of Rome would have been scattered like chaff before the legions of Cæsar recruited from the farms of Italy. So it will be with us if we allow the usurer to further fasten his grasp upon our people. If we continue this organization of capital, by which those who can not combine are deprived of the products of their toil, I say the end is near.

Our last census shows that the earnings of 54 per cent of our people are less than $100 per year per capita. How near we come to European conditions, if $100 per capita by 54 per cent of our people is all they can earn and consume; and yet we stand upon this floor and boast about the high wages of the American toiler. It is well to review the last census, which shows that 250,000 men own forty-four billion dollars of the wealth of the United States and 52 per cent do not own their homes and have no property whatever.

These problems, Mr. President, are pertinent. We can no longer satisfy the American people by quarreling and by fighting a sham battle over schedules in a tariff bill. We have done that for the last several years, with first one party in power and then the other, until to-day the tariff issue has fled from our politics. Last week it was demonstrated more than ever before that you can no longer divide the American people upon a question of schedules in a tariff. Other and mightier questions now do and must in the future divide parties and press for solution.

D

CHAPTER XX

BIG BUSINESS IN POLITICS

ISCUSSION was proceeding upon an anti-trust bill called from the table by Senator Pettigrew, when Senator Bacon said (page 7119, Congressional

Record):

MR. BACON. In this connection I want to call the attention of the Senate to the most remarkable thing I ever heard. and the most remarkable thing I ever saw in the Senate. I fancy that the country has never been the witness to what we saw and heard in this Chamber two days ago.

A Senator in his place in this Chamber stated as a fact that the manufacturer of ships, a prominent, and the most prominent, firm engaged in the manufacture of war ships for the Government, had stated that in 1892 he was approached by the officers of the Republican party and induced to give $400,000 to the campaign fund of that party upon the assurance that the money would be returned to him or made good to him in the contracts which he should have in the building of warships.

Now, Mr. President, the remarkable thing that I want to call the attention of the Senate to is this: I heard that statement. I did not doubt that it would then and there be promptly challenged. I did not believe that such a statement could be made in the Senate of the United States in the presence of the leaders of the Republican party and no one deny it or call it in question.

Now, that was not made in a thin Senate; it was made in a full Senate. It was made when the present chairman of the national committee of the Republican party was in his seat and heard it. It was made when the chairman of the na