could not survive. And yet, in justice, we must recall that when
they grew up in the day of small things, they were beneficial;
their founders had no idea of their becoming a menace to the
Nation. The man who built the first cotton-mill in his section,
or started the first iron-furnace, or laid the first stretch of
railroad, was rightly hailed as a benefactor; and he could not
foresee that the time would come when his mill, entering into a
business combination with a hundred other mills in different
parts of the country, would be merged. in a monopoly to strangle
competition in cotton manufacture. Likewise, the first stretch of
railroad joined another, and this a third, and so on, until there
had arisen a vast railway system under a single management from
New York to San Francisco. Now, while these colossal monopolies
had grown up so naturally, responding to the wonderful expansion
of the population they served, the laws and regulations which
applied to them, having been framed in the days when they were
young and small and harmless, still obtained. The clothes made
for the little boy would not do for the giant man. I have heard a
lawyer complain that statutes, which barely sufficed when travel
and transportation went by stage-coach, were stretched to fit the
needs of the public in its relation with transcontinental
railroads. This is an exaggeration, no doubt, but it points
towards truth. The Big Interests were so swollen that they went
ahead on their own affairs and paid little attention to the
community on which they were battening. They saw to it that if
any laws concerning them had to be made by the State Legislatures
or by Congress, their agents in those bodies should make them. A
certain Mr. Vanderbilt, the president of one of the largest
railroad systems in America, a person whose other gems of wit and
wisdom have not been recorded, achieved such immortality, as it