The Prescott daily news., 1912-08-07

sion. and 1t should Se downward, un- hesitatingly and steadily downward, It should segin with the schedules which have been most obviously used to kill competition and to raise prices in the United States, arbitrarily and without regard to the prices pertaining else where in the markets of the world; and 1t should. before 1t Is finished or intermitted, be extended to every item opportunity for monopoly. for special advantage to limited groups of beqeh- charles, or for subsidized control of any kind in the markets or the enter prises of the country; until special favors of every sort have been abso- lutely withdrawn and every part of our laws of taxation shall have been trans formed from a system of government al patronage into system of just and reasonable charges which shall fall where they will create the least bur den. When We shall have done that, we can fix questions of revenue and of business adjustment in a new spirit and with clear minds. We shall then be partners with all the business men of the country, and a day of freer, more stable prosperity shall have dawned
 Control of the Trusts.
 The governor spoke of how recent investigations have revealed the con- nection between the tariff and the movement Of prices, and this brought him to the subject of trusts, concern ing which he said in part
 l am not one of those who think that competition can be established by law against the drift of a world wide economic tendency; neither am l one of those who believe that busi- ness done upon great scale by a single rganization-call 1t corpora tion, or what you willis necessarily dangerous to the liberties, even the economic liberties. of great people like our own, full of intelligence and of indomitable energy. l am not afraid of anything that is normal dare say we shall never return to the old order of individual competition. and that the organization of business upon a great scale of cooperation is. up to a certain point itself normal and inevitable
 Power in the hands of great bust ness men does not make me apprehen- sive, unless it springs out of advan- tages which they have not created for themselves Big business is not dan gerous because it Is big, but because its bigness Is an unwholesome infla- tion created by privileges and exemp- tions which 1t ought not to enjoy, While competition cannot be created by statutory enactment, 1t can in large measure be revived by changing the laws and forbidling the practices that killed 1t, and by enacting laws that will give it heart and occasion again We can arrest and prevent monopoly. It has assumed new shapes and adopt ed new processes in our time, but these are now being disclosed and can be dealt with
 Concentration of Credit.
 But the problem and the difficulty are much greater than that There are not merely great trusts and com binations which are to be controlled and deprived of their power to create monopolies and destroy rivals. there is something bigger still than they are and more subtle, more evasive, more difficult to deal with There are vast confederacies (as I may perhaps call them for the sake of convenience) of banks, railways, express compa- nies, insurance companies. manufac- turing corporations, mining corpora tions, power and development com panies and all the rest of the circle, bound together by the fact that the ownership of their stock and the members of their boards of directors are controlled and determined by com paratively small and closely inter- related groups of persons who, by their informal confederacy, may con trol, If they please and when they will, both credit and enterprise
 There is nothing illegal about these confederacies, so far as 1 can per ceive. They have come about very naturally, generally without plan or deliberation, rather because there was so much money to be invested and 1t was in the hands. at great financial centers, of men acquainted with one another and intimately as- sociated in business, than because anyone had conceived and was carry ing out plan of general control; but they are none the less potent a force in our economic and financial system on that account. They are part of our problem. Their very ex- istence gives rise to the susnicion of