organization will constitute a genuine advance in industrial economy.  Large corporations, which can afford the best machinery; which control abundant capital, and which can plan with scrupulous economy all the details of producing and selling an important product or service, are actually able to reduce the cost of production to a minimum; and in the cases of certain American corporations such results have actually been achieved.  The new organization of American industry has created an economic mechanism which is capable of being wonderfully and indefinitely serviceable to the American people.

On the other hand, its serviceability is much diminished by the special opportunities it gives a few individuals.  These opportunities do not amount in any case to a monopoly, but they do amount to a species of economic privilege which enable them to wring profits from the increasing American market disproportionate to the value of their economic services.  What is still more unfortunate, however, is the equivocal position of these big corporations in respect to the laws under which they are organized, and in respect to the public authorities which are supposed to control them.  Many of the large railway and industrial corporations have reached their present size partly by an evasion or a defiance of the law.  Their organizers took advantage of the American system of local self-government and the American disposition to reduce the functions of the Federal government to a minimum—­they took advantage of these legal conditions and political ideas to organize an industrial machinery which cannot be effectively reached by local statutes and officials.  The favorable corporation laws of some states have been used as a means of preying upon the whole country; and the unfavorable corporation laws of other states have been practically nullified.  The big corporations have proved to be too big and powerful for the laws and officials to which the American political system has subjected them; and their equivocal legal position has resulted in the corruption of American public life and in the serious deterioration of our system of local government.

The net result of the industrial expansion of the United States since the Civil War has been the establishment in the heart of the American economic and social system of certain glaring inequalities of condition and power.  The greater American railroad and industrial corporations control resources and conduct operations on a scale unprecedented in the economic history of the world.  The great American industrial leaders have accumulated fortunes for which there is also no precedent on the part of men who exercise no official political power.  These inequalities are the result of the organization of American industry on almost a national scale,—­an organization which was brought about as a means of escape from the intolerable evils of unregulated competition.  Every aspect of American business methods has helped