greed on one side, and lawless brutality on the other――the outlook frowns. On the wisdom of the rulers of the country in salving or embittering these antagonisms――still more, on the fortune of the people in either modifying or hardening their present conviction that to get dollars is the one end of life――it depends whether the future of the United States is to be of eminent beneficence or unspeakable disaster. It may stretch out the light of liberty to the whole world. It may become the devil’s drill-ground where the cohorts of anarchy will furnish themselves against the social Armageddon.” Mr. Steevens here clearly points out, what every one ought to recognize, that if individualism is left absolutely uncontrolled as a modern business condition, the curious result will follow that all power of individual achievement and individual effort in the average man will be crushed out just as effectively as if the State took absolute control of everything. It would be easy to name several big corporations, each one of which has within its sphere crushed out all competition so as to make, not only its rivals, but its customers as dependent upon it as if the Government had assumed complete charge of the product. It would, in my judgment, be a very unhealthy thing for the Government thus to assume complete charge; but it is even more unhealthy to permit a private monopoly thus to assume it. The simple truth is that the defenders of the theory of unregulated lawlessness in the business world are either insincere, or blind to the facts, when they speak of their system as permitting a healthy individualism and individual initiative. On the contrary, it crushes out individualism; save in a very few able and powerful men, who tend to become dictators in the business world precisely as in the old days a Spanish-American president tended to become a dictator in the political world.