a retriever.

Had the people been honest and intelligent, as the politicians affirmed
them to be, the combination of capital could have worked no public
injury--would, in truth, have been a great public benefit. It enormously
reduced the expense of production and distribution, assured greater
permanency of employment, opened better opportunities to general and
special aptitude, gave an improved product, and at first supplied it at a
reduced price. Its crowning merit was that the industries of the country,
being controlled by a few men from a central source, could themselves be
easily controlled by law if law had been honestly administered. Under the
old order of scattered jurisdictions, requiring a multitude of actions at
law, little could be done, and little was done, to put a check on
commercial greed; under the new, much was possible, and at times something
was accomplished. But not for long; the essential dishonesty of the
American character enabled these capable and conscienceless
managers--"captains of industry" and "kings of finance"--to buy with money
advantages and immunities superior to those that the labor unions could
obtain by menaces and the promise of votes. The legislatures, the courts,
the executive officers, all the sources of authority and springs of
control, were defiled and impested until right and justice fled affrighted
from the land, and the name of the country became a stench in the nostrils
of the world.

Let us pause in our narrative to say here that much of the abuse of the
so-called "trusts" by their victims took no account of the folly,
stupidity and greed of the victims themselves. A favorite method by which
the great corporations crushed out the competition of the smaller ones and
of the "individual dealers" was by underselling them--a method made
possible by nothing but the selfishness of the purchasing consumers who