Early in 1888 Edward Bellamy published a romance entitled _Looking Backward_, in which his hero, Mr. Julian West, went to sleep in 1887, with labor controversy and trust denunciation sounding in his ears, to awake in the year 2000 A.D. The socialized state into which the hero was reborn was a picture of an end to which industry was perhaps drifting. It caught public attention. Clubs of enthusiasts tried to hasten the day of nationalization by forming Bellamistic societies. Those who were repelled by a future in which the trusts and the State were merged became more active in their demand for regulation. The legislative side of trust regulation, like that of railway regulation, was made more difficult because of the division of powers between Congress and the States. It was an interesting question whether one State could control a monopoly as large as the nation. But the States passed anti-trust laws by the score, as they had passed the railway laws. As in the earlier case they found their model in the common law, which had long prohibited conspiracies in restraint of trade. One of the States, Ohio, with only the common law to go upon, brought suit against the Standard Oil Trust and secured a prohibition against it in 1892. It was relatively easy to attack the formal organization of the trust, but in spite of such attacks concentration continued to produce ever greater combinations, as though it were fulfilling some fundamental economic law. Those of the anti-monopolists who were also tariff reformers had a weapon to urge besides that of regulation. They maintained that part of the power of the corporations was due to the needless favors of protection, which deprived the United States of the aid that competition from European manufacturers might have given. They insisted that a revision of the tariff would do much to remove the burden of the trusts. The House ordered an investigation of the trusts while it was engaged on the futile Mills Bill in 1888, but it was the latter that furnished the text for the ensuing presidential campaign.