The Leon reporter. (Leon, Iowa) 1887-1930, 1908-10-29

the interests of the people demand,
would the number Of trusts have null
tplied so rapidly? Not only would
the trusts doing business have been
put out of business. but men would
not have put money into new trusts
If they had believed that the law
against trusts and against persons
guilty of combining would be vigorous
ly enforced
| submit that by the test of punish
ing lawbreakers and deterring others
from violating the law-the eternal
and true test-the execution of the
antitrust laws by the federal govern
ment is failure; and that the exist
ence and hourishing condition of the
very trusts you have prosecuted con-
vinces the people that the trusts are
superior to law, or as Woodrow Will
son, president of Princeton university.
said last week:
The most striking fact about the
actual organization of modern society
is that the most conspicuous, tie most
readily welded, and the most formida-
bic power is not the power of the gov
eminent, but the power of capital. Men
OF our day in England and America
nave almost forgotten what it is to
rear the government, but have found
out what it is to fear the power OF
capital to watch it with jealousy and
suspicion, and trace to it the source
Vt every open or hidden wrong"
l submit that the collection or fines
from trusts aggregating a million dol
Ears, II You had collected so much,
"hlch mas not been done, would be no
punishment worth the name of pun
lshment to the 2S7 trusts with an ag-
sregate capitalization of $6.972.44S,-
ool.oo. The filming process in trust
prosecution is analogous to those fines
imposed by Il police justice upon per
sons keeping illegal resorts in towns.
these fines often operate as a sliding
scale Of license ax-so may dollars
whenever the aroused moral sense of
the community will no longer be silent
while the lawless dive debauches the
people. What the people wish to know
Is this: How many trusts have YOU
compelled to dissolve-in truth. and
not merely to officially dissolve and
then continue to fix the price, as the
dissolved paper trust has done? The
meat trust paid fine and soon put I'D
the prices of all that men must eat by
some now ou-see-it- and-now-you-don't
slelSht of hand that seems to escape
further prosecution while continuing TO
levy taN upon all the people. No
prosecution of the trusts is effective
that is not felt by the public in re-
hevlng them of trust imposition in
what they buy. Your department SAYS
tne paper trust was prosecuted and
dissolved, but the publishers know that
lhe mills in the trust have cOmbina-
tlon now as injurious to them as before
your prosecution. You say YOU have
prosecuted the tobacco trust, but that
trust has put up the price Of the manu-
1actured product 1t sells and put down
at WIFI tie price of the raw material
1t buys from the farmer. You do not
claim, believe, to have ever even in
sututed proceedings against the steel
trust, and only last year, in the teeth
Of the law, your department acuuiesced
IN the complete monopoly of that giant
OF trusts when it took over the only
large company able to compete with
it in any line of production.
1T your department in seven Years
has prosecuted nineteen civil and
twenty-five criminal cases, in which
no trust official has been Jailed and no
trust robbing the people has been com
PEELED to take its grasp from the throat
OF free competition while 223 new
trusts have been born during the Nc
klnley and Roosevelt Republican adj
mlnlstrations, how long at this rate If
progress will it take the Republican
administration to stop the extortion of
2S' trusts that fatten by taxing the
people! That is the question that the
voters are propounding and it is a
question which the department of JUS
tice should answer
l am, sir
Yours very respectfully,
[Signed]