It is necessary to refer briefly again to the subject of trusts. In England a great corporation which was able to demonstrate beyond dispute that it had materially cheapened the cost of any staple article to the public, and further showed that when, in the process of extending its operations, it of necessity wiped out any smaller business concerns, it never failed to provide the owners or partners of those concerns with managerial positions which secured to them a larger income than they could have hoped to earn as individual traders, and moreover took into their service the employees of the disbanded concerns at equal salaries,--such a corporation would generally be regarded by the English people as a public benefactor and as a philanthropically and charitably disposed institution. In America the former consideration has some weight, though not much; the latter none at all. When a trust takes into its service those men whom it has destroyed as individual traders, the fact remains that their industrial independence has been crushed. The individual can no longer "insist upon himself." He is subordinate and no longer free. One of the first principles of American business life, the encouragement of individual initiative, has been violated, and nothing will atone for it. The Standard Oil Company can, I believe, prove beyond possibility of contradiction that the result of its operations has been to reduce immensely the cost of oil to the public, as well as to give facilities in the way of distribution of the product which unassociated enterprise could never have furnished. It can also show that in many, and, I imagine, in the majority, of cases, it has endeavoured to repair by offers of employment of various sorts whatever injuries it has done to individuals by ruining their business. But these things constitute no defence in the eyes of the American people.