the existence of some monopolistic element or tendency in its
business. The Federal Government should regulate the activities
of corporations doing an interstate business, just as it
regulates the activities of national banks, and, through the
Interstate Commerce Commission, the operations of the railroads.

Roosevelt was destined, however, not to achieve the full measure
of national control of corporations that he desired. The elements
opposed to his view were too powerful. There was a fortuitous
involuntary partnership though it was not admitted and was even
violently denied between the advocates of "Let us alone!" and of
"Smash the trusts!" against the champion of the middle way. In
his "Autobiography" Roosevelt has described this situation:

"One of the main troubles was the fact that the men who saw the
evils and who tried to remedy them attempted to work in two
wholly different ways, and the great majority of them in a way
that offered little promise of real betterment. They tried (by
the Sherman law method) to bolster up an individualism already
proved to be both futile and mischievous; to remedy by more
individualism the concentration that was the inevitable result of
the already existing individualism. They saw the evil done by the
big combinations, and sought to remedy it by destroying them and
restoring the country to the economic conditions of the middle of
the nineteenth century. This was a hopeless effort, and those who
went into it, although they regarded themselves as radical
progressives, really represented a form of sincere rural toryism.
They confounded monopolies with big business combinations, and in
the effort to prohibit both alike, instead of where possible
prohibiting one and drastically controlling the other, they