In the presidential campaigns for the last dozen
or more years, the country from one end to the other
has rung with the denunciation of trusts. Eminent
speakers from every political platform, including
the representatives of organized labor have joined in
the outcry. Every capitalistic trust has been repre-
sented as a great octopus whose outstretched ten-
tacles were constantly drawing into its ravenous
maw the ruined business of countless small concerns,
and raising the prices of commodities to unheard of
heights, thereby increasing the cost of living beyond
all former times. That the trusts deserve a good
deal of the denunciation hurled at them, is probably
true; but it appears that the labor union part of
those chasing the octopus, are making a great noise
to distract attention from themselves, the most op-
pressive of all trusts. We understand that a trust
in the sense in which we are speaking of it, is a com-
bination of capital or labor in restraint of trade. It
will be well to give a more detailed definition of
the word as here used. We may then define a trust
as a combination in which several men combine
their capital or labor for the purpose of controlling
the output and sale of a given product, of fixing the

91



d2 THE WHITE SLAVERY

price of the product and the wages of lahor, and
of destroying all competition in the manufacture
and sale of the product and of labor. That is, those
who refuse to go into the combination are to be
undersold in the market until the selling of the prod-
uct becomes so unprofitable that they are obliged
to go out of business. When the trust crushes all
opposition, destroys all competition, it then raises
the price of the product to whatever point it may
consider expedient, taking into account the temper of
the public to stand the advance. By its methods of
getting control of the market, the trust not only
makes the public pay for the losses it sustains while
destroying competition ; but it also makes the public
pay the profits of the trust after competition has
been destroyed. 