After the formation of each trust the first step was almost invariably to limit production by shutting down a portion of the mills controlled by the combination, thus reducing the number of wage earners. And almost as invariably the next step was to increase prices. By thus reducing expenses and increasing receipts the result was, though much of the trust property had been put in at an enormously inflated valuation, the watered stock yet earned exceedingly large dividends. The evil was not only that these unnatural dividends were earned at the expense of the laborer and the consumer, but that concentration of profits was leading to congestion of capital in certain sections of the country at the expense of other sections. The great friend and helper of the trust-promoter was, of course, the high protective tariff. Without the tariff, to shut out competition from abroad, it would be impossible for the domestic concerns to form a close corporation and arbitrarily to fix prices. But Congress, instead of attempting to remedy the evil by lowering the tariff, deliberately raised it, being particularly careful to see that the percentage on trust-controlled goods was made sufficiently high to render foreign competition impossible. This led the Philadelphia _Ledger_, a Republican newspaper, to remark: “If Congress had any genuine regard for the interests of the people, or if it were sincere of purpose respecting their common welfare, or in regard to the proper protection of labor, it would promptly transfer to the free list every product controlled by a conscienceless and predatory trust which reduces production, cuts off working people from work and wages, and increases prices to the tens of millions of consumers.” The correctness of this view was testified to, before the United States Industrial Commission, in June, 1899, by no less a personage than Henry O. Havemeyer, president of the sugar trust, who said: “The existing [tariff] bill and the preceding one have been the occasion of the formation of all the large trusts with very few exceptions, inasmuch as they provide for an inordinate protection to all the interests of the country—sugar refining excepted. All this agitation against trusts is against merely the business machinery employed to take from the public what the government in its tariff laws says it is proper and suitable they should have. It is the government, through its tariff laws, which plunders the people, and the trusts, etc., are merely the machinery for doing it.” The showing regarding trusts made in the “Commercial Year Book” for 1899 was startling. Its salient features may be thus tabulated: 1899 1898 Number of trusts 353 200 Stock $5,118,494,181 $3,283,521,452 Bonded debt 714,388,661 378,720,091 Stock and bonds 5,832,882,842 3,662,241,543