Nor is this the worst.  Under the shifting interpretation of the Sherman law, uncertainty and fear is chilling the energies of the great body of honest American business men.  As the Sherman law now stands, no two business men can arrange their mutual affairs and be sure that they are not law-breakers.  This is the main hindrance to the immediate and permanent revival of American business.  If German or English business men, with all their disadvantages compared with our advantages, were manacled by our Sherman law, as it stands, they soon would be bankrupt.  Indeed, foreign business men declare that, if their countries had such a law, so administered, they could not do business at all.

Even this is not all.  By the decrees of our courts, under the Sherman law, the two mightiest trusts on earth have actually been licensed, in the practical outcome, to go on doing every wrong they ever committed.  Under the decrees of the courts the Oil and Tobacco Trusts still can raise prices unjustly and already have done so.  They still can issue watered stock and surely will do so.  They still can throttle other business men and the United Cigar Stores Company now is doing so.  They still can corrupt our politics and this moment are indulging in that practice.

The people are tired of this mock battle with criminal capital.  They do not want to hurt business, but they do want to get something done about the trust question that amounts to something.  What good does it do any man to read in his morning paper that the courts have “dissolved” the Oil Trust, and then read in his evening paper that he must thereafter pay a higher price for his oil than ever before?  What good does it do the laborer who smokes his pipe to be told that the courts have “dissolved” the Tobacco Trust and yet find that he must pay the same or a higher price for the same short-weight package of tobacco?  Yet all this is the practical result of the suits against these two greatest trusts in the world.

Such business chaos and legal paradoxes as American business suffers from can be found nowhere else in the world.  Rival nations do not fasten legal ball and chain upon their business—­no, they put wings on its flying feet.  Rival nations do not tell their business men that if they go forward with legitimate enterprise the penitentiary may be their goal.  No!  Rival nations tell their business men that so long as they do honest business their governments will not hinder but will help them.

But these rival nations do tell their business men that if they do any evil that our business men do, prison bars await them.  These rival nations do tell their business men that if they issue watered stock or cheat the people in any way, prison cells will be their homes.

Just this is what all honest American business wants; just this is what dishonest American business does not want; just this is what the American people propose to have; just this the national Republican platform of 1908 pledged the people that we would give them; and just this important pledge the administration, elected on that platform, repudiated as it repudiated the more immediate tariff pledge.