The disagreement among students of monopoly relates to the fundamental question of permitting or not permitting these combinations to exist. According to the first theory, of which Mr. Justice Brandeis is the most distinguished exponent, no new industrial monopolies should be permitted, and those that we have should be dissolved. The basis of this theory is the assumption that all the economies and all the productive efficiency found in monopolistic concerns can be developed and maintained in smaller business organisations, and that the method of prevention and dissolution is the simplest means of protecting the public against the danger of extortionate monopoly prices. Attention has been called in a preceding paragraph to the impossibility of determining whether the great monopolistic combinations have on the average shown themselves to be more efficient than concerns subject to active and adequate competition. It is significant, however, that in the discussion of this subject which took place at the twenty-sixth annual meeting of the American Economic Association, at Minneapolis in 1913, the economists who participated were practically unanimous in holding that the superior efficiency of the trusts had not been demonstrated, but was a matter of serious doubt, and that the burden of proof of their alleged superiority had been definitely shifted upon those who maintained the affirmative.[183] Probably the great majority of the whole body of American economists would share these conclusions.