is, by remarking, "The public be damned." Probably the president
and directors of a score of other monopolies would have heartily
echoed that impolitic and petulant display of arrogance.
Impolitic the exclamation was, because the American public had
already begun to feel that the Big Interests were putting its
freedom in jeopardy, and it was beginning to call for laws which
should reduce the power of those interests.

As early as 1887 the Interstate Commerce Act was passed, the
earliest considerable attempt to regulate rates and traffic. Then
followed anti-trust laws which aimed at the suppression of
"pools," in which many large producers or manufacturers combined
to sell their staples at a uniform price, a practice which
inevitably set up monopolies. The "Trusts" were to these what the
elephant is to a colt. When the United States Steel Corporation
was formed by uniting eleven large steel plants, with an
aggregate capital of $11100,000,000, the American people had an
inkling of the magnitude to which Trusts might swell. In like
fashion when the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern
Railroads found a legal impediment to their being run by one
management, they got round the law by organizing the Northern
Securities Company, which was to hold the stocks and bonds of
both railroads. And so of many other important industrial and
transportation mergers. The most powerful financial promoters of
the country, led by Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, were busy setting up
these combinations on a large scale and the keenest corporation
lawyers spent their energy and wits in framing charters which
obeyed the letter of the laws, but wholly denied their spirit.

President Roosevelt worked openly, with a definite purpose.