Any one who wants to know more than he already does of the power and extent of industrial monopolies in this country should read the vigorous report of Attorney-General Wickersham presented to Congress in December, 1910. Consider the relations to the vicious combinations Mr. Wickersham enumerates, of the protection so many of them enjoy. Take away the protection of the window-glass trust, and does any one believe its high-handedness would not be gradually checked? If the tobacco trust and sugar trust and paper trust and powder trust and beef trust, all of which Mr. Wickersham attacks for extortions and brigandage, had to meet world competition, does anybody doubt that they would not find many of their present methods impractical? Protection is so obvious an aid to them that it seems like insisting that two and two make four even to refer to it. But put this up to a stand-patter who knows his formula, and what do you get? Why, the answer that protection was never intended to foster trusts, and therefore it cannot be that it is doing so! Protection, he will tell you, provides for domestic competition, and, since it provides for it, his idea seems to be we must have it! Whatever is in the formula is in practice! It is no backwoods member from a remote Pennsylvania iron-and-steel district who asserts this. It is the ablest man of them all—Senator Aldrich himself. “I cannot conceive of such a thing as a monopoly under protection” was the substance of Senator Aldrich’s argument on the point in the last tariff debate, as it had been for twenty-five years. Curiously enough, the same intellect which declares that monopoly cannot exist under protection will under stress argue: Take the duty from those who have formed trusts, but give it to us who have not. “In order that you may?” one feels like asking. This was a link in the argument of the gentlemen who pleaded in 1909 that Schedules I and K (cotton and wool) should remain undisturbed. There is no “cotton trust”; therefore continue duties long unnecessary and wink at those which trickery forces through! True, there is no cotton trust—as yet. But how are trusts bred? Does our experience show us a more fruitful father of them than cutting off foreign competition, as the new duties on the higher grade of cottons seem to have done? How are trusts bred? Is there any one left who does not know that when such privileges as prohibitive tariffs are dangled before men’s eyes they rush to seize them, build and build again, regardless of all laws of trade? Is there any one left who does not know that over-stimulated production pays a penalty in half-time and shut-downs as truly as a man’s intemperance pays one in physical and mental exhaustion? And in the period of depression the new and weak fall into the hands of the rich and long-established. This has been the history of many a cotton factory. Why should it not all end as it has in scores of other industries?