A man who wishes to succeed to-day dare not try to compete with the Trust; he must join it or be boycotted by it; that is to say, if he attempts to undersell the Trust, all retail dealers will be forbidden to buy from him, and he will have no market for his goods.

There has been a great outcry against this investigation, and the Trusts are very indignant.  They declare that such investigations ruin trade, and make prices higher.  To prove this argument, the Sugar Trust has put the price of sugar up an eighth of a cent a pound, or about forty cents a barrel.

This is, however, an argument that works both ways.  If the Sugar Trust is so powerful that it can revenge itself for the investigation by putting the price of sugar up, it is then too powerful for the welfare of the people, and it shows clearly that it is high time that the government makes an attempt to restrict the power of the Trusts.

* * * * *

Admiral Bunce and his fleet of warships have been engaged in some very interesting naval practice off Charleston.

The especial object of the visit was to see if they could effectually blockade the port.

In making their trip down the coast, the fleet ran into a heavy gale off Cape Hatteras, and Admiral Bunce was able to see how the vessels under his command behave in a storm.

Arrived off Charleston, the Admiral arranged the fleet in a cordon across the mouth of Charleston harbor, and when night came, ordered the little cruiser Vesuvius to steam out to sea, and then try to steal back into port without being discovered by the big warships that were guarding the harbor.

In other words, the Vesuvius was ordered to “run the blockade.”

In times of war, an enemy will often blockade a port by stationing big ships in such positions that they may prevent any vessels from entering or leaving the port, just as the combined fleets of Europe are preventing the Greek fleet, under Prince George, from entering the harbor of Canea.

In our late war the harbor of Charleston was actually blockaded, and vessels were regularly employed as blockade runners, many of them getting through without difficulty, and many having hair-breadth escapes.

The steamers selected to run the blockade in war times were light, swift, and built so that they lay very low in the water.  They were painted a dull gray color, so that they could not be seen at a distance; their funnels were made like telescopes, so that they could be shut up, and be little higher than the deck, when the moment for actually running the blockade arrived.  They burned smokeless coal, and could blow their steam off under water, so that it was very hard to discover them, and on dark nights they could often slip by the watching vessels without being observed.

Admiral Bunce thought that the search-light system which is in use on all our war-vessels would make it extremely difficult for a blockade runner to pass a modern blockade, and it was to test this that the game of blockade running was tried off Charleston.