We hold that all such efforts to reproduce dead-and-gone conditions are bound to result in failure or worse than failure. The breaking-up of the Standard Oil Trust, for example, has not produced the very smallest benefit. It has merely resulted in enormously increasing the already excessive profits of a small number of persons. Not the smallest benefit would accrue--on the contrary, harm would result--if in dealing with the Steel Corporation we merely substituted for one such big corporation four or five smaller corporations of the stamp of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company. The “Survey” published a study of the conditions of life and labor among the wage-workers of this company which it is not too much to describe as appalling. The effort to remedy conditions in connection with the trusts by the establishment, instead of one big company, of four such companies engaged in cutthroat competition, cannot work the smallest betterment, and would probably work appreciable harm. That kind of “new” freedom is nothing whatever but the old, old license for the powerful to prey on the feeble.
There is a very real need of governmental action, but it should be action along a totally different line. The result of the unlimited action of the competition system is seen at this moment in the bituminous coal-mines of West Virginia, where the independent operators, in the ferocity of their unregulated competition, and partly because they are forbidden to combine even for useful purposes, seek their profit in the merciless exploitation of the wage-workers who toil for them. The law, in the strict spirit of the “new freedom,” forbids them to combine for a useful purpose, and yet offers no check upon their dealing with their employees in a spirit of brutal greed. What is needed is thoroughgoing, efficient, and, if necessary, drastic supervision and control of the great corporations doing an interstate business, by means of a Federal administrative body akin in its functions to the Interstate Commerce Commission. This body should have power not only to enforce publicity, but to secure justice and fair treatment to investors, wage-workers, business rivals, consumers, and the general public alike.