We all have seen the Coal Trust keeping ready armed men to shoot working citizens whenever it should give the order. This Coal Trust, in a calm, matter-of-fact way, boasted that it would, if necessary, "call out the United States Government troops" to shoot the miners. Here is one trust already talking as though it controlled the army and all the other forces of Government. The trusts believe themselves already in control, and their national power is very great. The crisis of trust development has not been reached. The present power of concentrated, organized money is very great, but it is nothing to the power which money will exert in the future. This future development of the trust force should be discussed and studied calmly, rationally and dispassionately by all Americans. There is no use in denouncing or in hating the trusts. It is true that they are entirely selfish; it is NOT true that they represent evil, pure and simple. The trust is a necessary development in humanity's journey toward organization, concentration and the simplifying of industry. The first locomotive ever built was a trust. It performed the work of a thousand four-horse teams, deprived four thousand horses and a thousand drivers of a livelihood. The railroad trust is simply an extension of the concentration of labor, the simplifying of industrial operation, represented in the building of the first locomotive. THE TRUSTS IN THE END WILL DO INFINITE GOOD. They will destroy the mean competition which for centuries has made liars, swindlers and slavedrivers of men. They will practically eliminate the great number of large private fortunes, and thus compel men to devote their energies to pursuits nobler than the accumulation of money. At first a few enormous fortunes will dominate the nation--the beginning of these great fortunes you may see already. Then will come the owning of the trusts--that is to say, of all the great national industries--by the nation itself. The people of the land will own and operate their own necessities. These necessities, instead of making a few men enormously rich at the expense of many, will contribute to the comfort of many without injustice to the few. ---- The development of trusts must run its course, like every other great feature of human history. Its beginning--in corrupt legislation, watered stocks, human selfishness--was inevitable. Its ending--in national ownership, competition eliminated, and industrial life vastly improved--is also inevitable. But thousands of struggles, thousands of economical battles, thousands of ruined men, will mark this evolution of human industry from the control of individual selfishness to the service of the nation. The duty of the people is to study and, as far as possible, to foresee and regulate this enormous and inevitable development of the trusts. The trusts cannot be destroyed, and they should not be destroyed.