succeeded merely in preventing any effective control of either.

"On the other hand, a few men recognized that corporations and
combinations had become indispensable in the business world, that
it was folly to try to prohibit them, but that it was also folly
to leave them without thoroughgoing control. These men realized
that the doctrine of the old laissez faire economists, of the
believers in unlimited competition, unlimited individualism,
were, in the actual state of affairs, false and mischievous. They
realized that the Government must now interfere to protect labor,
to subordinate the big corporation to the public welfare, and to
shackle cunning and fraud exactly as centuries before it had
interfered to shackle the physical force which does wrong by
violence. The big reactionaries of the business world and their
allies and instruments among politicians and newspaper editors
took advantage of this division of opinion, and especially of the
fact that most of their opponents were on the wrong path; and
fought to keep matters absolutely unchanged. These men demanded
for themselves an immunity from government control which, if
granted, would have been as wicked and as foolish as immunity to
the barons of the twelfth century. Many of them were evil men.
Many others were just as good men as were some of these same
barons; but they were as utterly unable as any medieval
castle-owner to understand what the public interest really was.
There have been aristocracies which have played a great and
beneficent part at stages in the growth of mankind; but we had
come to a stage where for our people what was needed was a real
democracy; and of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and
the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a
plutocracy."*