The Hawaiian gazette., 1916-08-04
THE 9HAW AIIAN GAZETTE
1oDTd a# EDITOR ' sgoas. Eos ssa THE

FRIDAY MORNING,
AUGUST |, 1916.

for the future is ridicuious from any quarter and
who are dressed in authority and therefore have
power to make their own errors hurtful.
"A brilliant young novelist, the late Frank Nor
ris, wrote tale called The Octopus" on which
we commented long ago, because it represented
the railroad as an Unsuitable devouring monster
with no more reason and discrimination than is
possessed BY the shark which is just now nfest-
unreal; railroad octopus would destroy itself by
cutting off its food supplies"
THE notion that nothing is dangerous a
million of dollars except two millions; the notion
that the possession of wealth implies wrong-doing
that il any business is big and successful it must
have become so by throttlng somebody-all these
are part of the same folly. few years ago, a
weekly journal made much of the cheating the
weights of raw sugars by refining corporation,
but there is cheating in retail trades also, and it
is not made more wicked when it succeeds.
"Waving the incidental exceptions, the general
truth is that success comes and fortunes grow by
moderate profit ratios on large scale of merchan-
dising or forwarding of articles necessary to man
kind; the small fraction on large scale becomes
visible fortune, misunderstood, hated, envied and
denounced but the larger benefit goes to the pub
,,ic unnotced and its tendency is to increase the
scale and reduce the cost of living, opposed and
overcome by other factors among which is the
obstinate effort of organized labor to promote
scarcity instead of abundance.
But this "provincialism?" Who are the pro-
vincial ones Are they the empire-builders like
the late James J. HILL the men who organize great
combined industries which reduce production cost,
increase efficiency, and incidentally raise wages !?
Are they the men who conceive and achieve large
things, or the ranters who declam and denounce
up and d. wn the land? The practise of antitrust
prosecutions has been to hit the biggest; that
agreed with the assumption that success and
wrong must go together, and it unquestonably
looked like watchful defense of the common people
from the octopus tribe.
when business, represented by commercial
bodies, has gone to Washington, during the last
thirty months to demonstrate against the stream
t disturbing statutes, it has found official ears
and eyes closed only those persons have been well
coined who confirmed the conceptions already
taken up by the official mind, in It's zeal for upft-
ing humanity when business men objected to any
thing they were accused to objecting to every
thing, and it was said that they were incompetent
witnesses in the matter, because they are en-
crested"
Reform, pithily remarked the late Prof Sumner
of Yale, consists in A and BIS getting together
and deciding what shall do. So our AS and BIS
in Washington have been doing, with their Clay
ton law, their Trade Commission law, their Sea-
mems law, their still menacing shipping bill, and
some other wild propositions less advanced to-
wards enactment After tying the bands, Mr..
Wilson now tells the country, for campaign uses,
that it is too provincial.
Expansion is the keynote, and exports are to
be politically approved, though the first of Mr.
Wilson's administration to put ban upon a
scheme OF American hnanciers to aid in develop
ing China, If there is really change in the no.
ton of what is politically expedent it is welcome
though tardy. If combination for exports is to be
accepted as not necessarily sinful perhaps COM
bnatOns for other lines may have the ban re-
moved, in time, and then the country may become
less timid and provincial"