When serious contest ends, when men unite in opinion and purpose, those who are to change their ways of business joining with those who ask for the change, it is possible to effect it in the way in which prudent and thoughtful and patriotic men would wish to see it brought about with as few, as slight, as easy and simple business readjustments as possible in the circumstances, nothing essential disturbed, nothing torn up by the roots, no parts rent asunder which can be left in wholesome combination.  Fortunately, no measures of sweeping or novel change are necessary.  It will be understood that our object is not to unsettle business or anywhere seriously to break its established courses athwart.  On the contrary, we desire the laws we are now about to pass to be the bulwarks and safeguards of industry against the forces that have disturbed it.  What we have to do can be done in a new spirit, in thoughtful moderation, without revolution of any untoward kind.

We are all agreed that “private monopoly is indefensible and intolerable,” and our program is founded upon that conviction.  It will be a comprehensive but not a radical or unacceptable program and these are its items, the changes which opinion deliberately sanctions and for which business waits: 

It waits with acquiescence, in the first place, for laws which will effectually prohibit and prevent such interlockings of the personnel of the directorates of great corporations—­banks and railroads, industrial, commercial, and public service bodies—­as in effect result in making those who borrow and those who lend practically one and the same, those who sell and those who buy but the same persons trading with one another under different names and in different combinations, and those who affect to compete in fact partners and masters of some whole field of business.  Sufficient time should be allowed, of course, in which to effect these changes of organization without inconvenience or confusion.

Such a prohibition will work much more than a mere negative good by correcting the serious evils which have arisen because, for example, the men who have been the directing spirits of the great investment banks have usurped the place which belongs to independent industrial management working in its own behoof.  It will bring new men, new energies, a new spirit of initiative, new blood, into the management of our great business enterprises.  It will open the field of industrial development and origination to scores of men who have been obliged to serve when their abilities entitled them to direct.  It will immensely hearten the young men coming on and will greatly enrich the business activities of the whole country.