Suppose Mr. Wilson try to enforce the criminal clause of the Sherman Anti-Trust law and put the coal magnates into jail? Suppose he try to compel the component parts of the Coal Trust actually to compete with each other. What will happen? This will happen. The component parts of the Coal Trust will refuse to compete. The men who are at the head of the coal companies are business associates of long standing. They know each other well, and they know well that none of them can make any money by fighting any of the others. So, when one gentleman announces a schedule of coal prices, none of the others will undercut him. All of the other coal companies will announce the same prices, because the owners of each company will also be the owners of all the other companies. Did you ever stop to consider what position the government will then be in? Will not its hands be tied? Can the government go into court and demand that the other companies cut their prices? Suppose the other companies say they cannot cut their prices without losing money? Suppose the other companies say nothing at all, except: “This coal belongs to us. We have quite as much right to fix our own price upon it as has the government to fix its own price upon postage stamps. That other coal companies have fixed the same price we have is no more the government’s business than it is because several grocers fix the same price upon sugar, bacon, tea or coffee.” It will then be up to the government to prove that the identicality of prices is the result of conspiracy. If conspiracy cannot be proved, the government can do nothing. In such a case, the government would never be able to prove conspiracy. The coal operators would not conspire over the telephone, or on the street corners. There would be little for them to conspire about, anyway. All of them would be financially interested in all of the companies, precisely as Mr. Rockefeller is financially interested in all of the constituent companies of the Standard Oil Company. The matter of price-fixing would probably be left to the dominating personality of the group, precisely as it is now left, more or less, to the strongest man among them. And, the prices he fixed would speedily become the prices of all. Thus do we perceive a peculiar feature of the human mind. Individually, we know what we should like to do about the Coal Trust and the railroads. We know we should like to own and operate them. But collectively we know no such thing. We do not get together. We act as if that which each of us believes were believed by no other than himself. We are like butter that will not “gather” or bees that will not “hive.”