although there are in Great Britain only 22,000 miles of railroad as against 200,000 miles in the United States. Beyond all question, such Congressional inquiry as that above mentioned should be conducted by national legislators whose official duty it is to study public sentiment and who are charged with responsibility for the destinies of the country, and endowed by the Constitution with power to determine its public policy. Without any attempt to define the specific features of such investigation I may in this connection mention certain of its main features. FIRST.-The question as to the limitations which should be placed upon competition in trade, in productive industry and in transportation, under present conditions, either through mutual agreements between the contestants, or by means of governmental regulation is an unsolved problem. Much light might be thrown upon the subject by means of a thorough Congressional investigation relative to the commercial, industrial and political aspects of the subject. SECOND. A similar need for Congressional investigation exists as to the limitations which should be placed upon combinations in trade, in productive industry and in transportation. THIRD. There seems to be great need just now for a thorough Congressional investigation of the question as to the propriety of any radical departure from that line of public policy constituting at the beginning one of the high ideals of our national life and commonly designated as Jeffersonianism. CONCLUSION. The foregoing is confessedly a special and partial presentation of a great subject which now commands the attention of the American people under the general and somewhat vague appellation of "The Trust Question." The particular object which I have had in view has been to show that restraints upon competition are absolutely necessary to the orderly and beneficent conduct of human affairs, both in the domain of self-government and of regulation by the political state, guided by enlightened views of self-interest. Avoiding any expression of opinion upon the recent decision of the United States Circuit Court for the District of Minnesota in the Northern Securities case, I have confined my observations to those fundamental questions of right and of policy which that court declared to be "not within the province of any court to decide, involving, as they do, questions of public policy which Congress must determine." It is greatly to be regretted that Congress has not yet directed its attention to the thorough and impartial investigation of this great subject in its various commercial, economic and political aspects, for it is a question of momentous interest to the whole country and to the civilized world. Already the subject of restraints upon human interaction in the affairs of life has been complicated by two notable legislative misadventures. Recent national legislation, on the one hand, appears to have been dictated. by attempts to revolutionize established conditions upon. which depend the present orderly conduct of business enterprise, and, on the other, by efforts to resist such attempts by mere experimental and temporizing legislative measures. The subject is worthy of a larger and more generous treatment. It is to be hoped that the Fifty-eighth Congress will address itself vigorously to the vitally important work of investigating the whole subject in all its commercial, industrial and political bearings, and with the determined purpose of settling it upon just and sure foundations. |