commerce is merely a proposal to carry out to the letter one of the prime purposes, if not the prime purpose, for which the Constitution was rounded.  It does not represent centralization.  It represents merely the acknowledgment of the patent fact that centralization has already come in business.  If this irresponsible outside business power is to be controlled in the interest of the general public it can only be controlled in one way—­by giving adequate power of control to the one sovereignty capable of exercising such power—­the National Government.  Forty or fifty separate state governments can not exercise that power over corporations doing business in most or all of them; first, because they absolutely lack the authority to deal with interstate business in any form; and second, because of the inevitable conflict of authority sure to arise in the effort to enforce different kinds of state regulation, often inconsistent with one another and sometimes oppressive in themselves.  Such divided authority can not regulate commerce with wisdom and effect.  The Central Government is the only power which, without oppression, can nevertheless thoroughly and adequately control and supervise the large corporations.  To abandon the effort for National control means to abandon the effort for all adequate control and yet to render likely continual bursts of action by State legislatures, which can not achieve the purpose sought for, but which can do a great deal of damage to the corporation without conferring any real benefit on the public.

I believe that the more farsighted corporations are themselves coming to recognize the unwisdom of the violent hostility they have displayed during the last few years to regulation and control by the National Government of combinations engaged in interstate business.  The truth is that we who believe in this movement of asserting and exercising a genuine control, in the public interest, over these great corporations have to contend against two sets of enemies, who, though nominally opposed to one another, are really allies in preventing a proper solution of the problem.  There are, first, the big corporation men, and the extreme individualists among business men, who genuinely believe in utterly unregulated business that is, in the reign of plutocracy; and, second, the men who, being blind to the economic movements of the day, believe in a movement of repression rather than of regulation of corporations, and who denounce both the power of the railroads and the exercise of the Federal power which alone can really control the railroads.  Those who believe in efficient national control, on the other hand, do not in the least object to combinations; do not in the least object to concentration in business administration.  On the contrary, they favor both, with the all important proviso that there shall be such publicity about their workings, and such thoroughgoing control over them, as to insure their being in the interest, and not against the interest, of the general