The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-10-03
DOLLIYER ON THE IOWA IDEA
ocontinued from First Pagel.

 great business, and especially for the 1 commercial conquests upon which We i are now entering. But they recognize l also the danger of abuses both in the organization and management of great 1 industrial enterprises, and would have the government of the United States 1 stand between the community and the reckless perversion of the beneicent law of corporate property. It is evil dent that. even if it were desirable to kill the trusts, it could rot be done by merely remitting the duties which their foreign competitors pay at our custom houses. Even MT. Bryan, who talks of putting the captains of industry into chain gang and sending J. Pierpont Morgan first to the poorhouse and then to the penitentiary, admits publicly that the free trade remedy falls very far short of the object he has in view. Nearly every sobed student of the sub feet admits that it was the pressure of competition which has drawn some of our industries first into groups and then into gigantic combinations under a single corporate management. A sue cessful attempt to repeal the law of competition in the American market 4@D protective tariff system, because the whole design of that system rests upon the unimpaired vitality of that law. Our tariffs have been defended out of consideration for infant industries, but that is not the foundation of the pro tective policy. They have been defend ed on account of the difference in the wage scales of Europe and America; but that is not the foundation of the protective policy. The long debates that were held in other generations about the rates of duty, whether the wall should be low enough to allow foreign merchandise to flow over it or high enough to barely allow it to leak over or to be pumped over, failed ut terly to comprehend the principle which has identified the doctrine of protection with the present day miracles of our Industrial progress. Protection in the perfection of it's design, as described by MT. Hamilton, does not invite competi- ton from abroad says MT. Blaine in his famous chapter on the tariff ques- ton in it's relation to the political rev. olution of 1860, in Twenty Years of Congress but is based on the control ling principle that competition at home #sNlll dlWdyS prevent Ou IIl6 x part of the capitalist assure good wages to the laborer and defend the consumer against the evils of extor- ton
 "That principle, which never failed to justify the doctrine of protection in any period of the past, is to-day pass- ing through an ordeal hardly even an- ticipated when the tariff law of 1897 was placed upon the statute books If one field of production after another passes under the control of speculators intent on nefarious schemes to engross the whole market, the protection liter ature of hundred years becomes mis- leading arid obsolete The census of 1900 has given an accurate account of the trusts and what they are doing, and the daily reports of the market place indicate what their present stand- ing and future prospects actually are. We know that they are 1855 in number, - represent the consolidation of 2,040 sep arate plants. We know that less than ten per cent of the factory labor of the country is employed by them, and only 14 per cent. of our manufactured out put is made by them, and, leaving out chemicals and the products of iron and steel, the per centage is hardly visible to the naked eye. In the textile indus tries, they are almost unknown. and E most of the other fields of American production they have entered as mere intruders and disturbers of the peace.
 Between 1890 and 1891, most of them have been established and in the ag- gregate, counting all kinds of stocks and all kinds of bonds. which they have issued, their gross capitalzat ton has been six and half billions of dol lars from which at least two billions should be deducted to cover spurious stock, which represented nothing except the swindling projects of adventurers and cheats at common law. So that, putting all the consultations. which have been effected in the last twelve years together, four and half billions of dollars may be set down as their true aggregate capitalization, including their bonds. These corporations have enlarged our productive capacity by the addition of. new bona f1de capital in a degree hardly noticeable. They have merely undertaken to dazzle the specu- lative world by placing upon the popu- lar fancy for full page advertisements. And in nearly every one of them the motive of the organization has been mainly to shield capital already invest ed from the operation of natural forces always present in the commercial world. If they have failed in that, they have failed in everything and the power which some have been afraid would be used to wrong and burden the commun- ity has not even proved equal to the task of taking care of itself.
 .sBefore anybody makes uD his mind that the so-called American trust is a permanent institution, let him consider the long list of ambitious combinations which have already had their affairs wound up by the courts of justice. The alcohol trust, the linseed oil trust, the alkali trust, the asphalt trust, the bi
 cycle trust and scores of others whose very names are now even forgotten. What was the matter with these aston ishing creations of the promoters art ? Nine out of ten of them were bogus and, without stretching the law very much could have been denied the use of the mails on an ordinary fraud or der. Only yesterday one of the man. moth establishments, the National Salt