=The Trusts and Railways.=—­To the trust question, Roosevelt devoted especial attention.  This was unavoidable.  By far the larger part of the business of the country was done by corporations as distinguished from partnerships and individual owners.  The growth of these gigantic aggregations of capital had been the leading feature in American industrial development during the last two decades of the nineteenth century.  In the conquest of business by trusts and “the resulting private fortunes of great magnitude,” the Populists and the Democrats had seen a grievous danger to the republic.  “Plutocracy has taken the place of democracy; the tariff breeds trusts; let us destroy therefore the tariff and the trusts”—­such was the battle cry which had been taken up by Bryan and his followers.

President Roosevelt countered vigorously.  He rejected the idea that the trusts were the product of the tariff or of governmental action of any kind.  He insisted that they were the outcome of “natural economic forces”:  (1) destructive competition among business men compelling them to avoid ruin by cooeperation in fixing prices; (2) the growth of markets on a national scale and even international scale calling for vast accumulations of capital to carry on such business; (3) the possibility of immense savings by the union of many plants under one management.  In the corporation he saw a new stage in the development of American industry.  Unregulated competition he regarded as “the source of evils which all men concede must be remedied if this civilization of ours is to survive.”  The notion, therefore, that these immense business concerns should be or could be broken up by a decree of law, Roosevelt considered absurd.

At the same time he proposed that “evil trusts” should be prevented from “wrong-doing of any kind”; that is, punished for plain swindling, for making agreements to limit output, for refusing to sell to customers who dealt with rival firms, and for conspiracies with railways to ruin competitors by charging high freight rates and for similar abuses.  Accordingly, he proposed, not the destruction of the trusts, but their regulation by the government.  This, he contended, would preserve the advantages of business on a national scale while preventing the evils that accompanied it.  The railway company he declared to be a public servant.  “Its rates should be just to and open to all shippers alike.”  So he answered those who thought that trusts and railway combinations were private concerns to be managed solely by their owners without let or hindrance and also those who thought trusts and railway combinations could be abolished by tariff reduction or criminal prosecution.