There will not be more, unless we find a way to prevent monopoly. You know
perfectly well that a trust business staggering under a capitalization many
times too big is not a business that can afford to admit competitors into the
field; because the minute an economical business, a business with its capital
down to hard pan, with every ounce of its capital working, comes into the
field against such an overloaded corporation, it will inevitably beat it and
undersell it; therefore it is to the interest of these gentlemen that
monopoly be maintained. They cannot rule the markets of the world in any way
but by monopoly. It is not surprising to find them helping to found a new
party with a fine program of benevolence, but also with a tolerant acceptance
of monopoly.

There is another matter to which we must direct our attention, whether we
like or not. I do not take these things into my mouth because they please my
palate; I do not talk about them because I want to attack anybody or upset
anything; I talk about them because only by open speech about them among
ourselves shall we learn what the facts are.

You will notice from a recent investigation that things like this take place:
A certain bank invests in certain securities. It appears from evidence that
the handling of these securities was very intimately connected with the
maintenance of the price of a particular commodity. Nobody ought, and in
normal circumstances nobody would, for a moment think of suspecting the
managers of a great bank of making such an investment in order to help those
who were conducting a particular business in the United States maintain the
price of their commodity; but the circumstances are not normal. It is
beginning to be believed that in the big business of this country nothing is
disconnected from anything else. I do not mean in this particular instance to
which I have referred, and I do not have in mind to draw any inference at
all, for that would be unjust; but take any investment of an industrial
character by a great bank. It is known that the directorate of that bank
interlaces in personnel with ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty boards
of directors of all sorts, of railroads which handle commodities, of great
groups of manufacturers which manufacture commodities, and of great merchants
who distribute commodities; and the result is that every great bank is under
suspicion with regard to the motive of its investments. It is at least
considered possible that it is playing the game of somebody who has nothing
to do with banking, but with whom some of its directors are connected and
joined in interest. The ground of unrest and uneasiness, in short, on the
part of the public at large, is the growing knowledge that many large
undertakings are interlaced with one another, are indistinguishable from one
another in personnel.

Therefore, when a small group of men approach Congress in order to induce the
committee concerned to concur in certain legislation, nobody knows the
ramifications of the interests which those men represent; there seems no
frank and open action of public opinion in public counsel, but every man is
suspected of representing some other man and it is not known where his
connections begin or end.