A Danger From Trusts

It is well understood by all citizens who are at all observant how extremely difficult it is for any community to control any company or corporation no matter how extortionate be its charges for its product when the stock of the concern is largely in the hands of a great body of citizens. If the corporation be one supplying something to the public, the public has to pay almost any old price that the company demands. Such concerns appear to find it an easy matter to control municipal governments. The people simply must pay the price or eat crow. The average citizen becomes very complaisant and conservative towards any such concern, no matter how clearly he understands the extortions it is practicing upon the public, so long as he is getting a share of the pork.

An editorial in Thursday's Chicago American is to the point on this subject and points out the danger to the rights of the people resulting from the present plan of the trusts to get blocks of their stock into the hands of many people. This editorial is in part as follows:

If any serious action is to be taken against the trusts, dear fellow citizens, the action will have to be taken pretty soon. Please believe that before many years shall have passed the man who advocates interfering with the trusts and their reckless operations will be looked down upon as a dangerous agitator and an enemy of property.

Today the average citizen is in favor of curbing the trusts, of attacking them through the tariff, of taxing them, of worrying them into decency. Because, today, it is understood that a few powerful trust builders own the trusts, collect the trust profits and that any trust regulation will be at the expense of these few very rich men.

But, very rapidly indeed, and very intelligently, these big trust men are putting themselves in a safe and strong position.

They know the American citizen very well, and they know that out of a hundred citizens in this age of competition, and of anxiety for the future, at least 80 percent think with their pockets. The trusts are establishing for themselves millions of little footholds in millions of American pockets. And you will find it very hard indeed to interfere with the trusts when these millions of American pockets shall begin thinking and sympathizing along trust lines.

The Steel Trust issues about fifteen hundred millions of securities. Of this some five hundred millions in bonds represent what the property cost. These five hundred millions of bonds are carefully held by Mr. Carnegie, who has two hundred millions of them, or more, and by the other wise ones.

The thousand million dollars of other steel securities will soon be located in the pockets of the people. As rapidly as can be managed the great trust men are selling their stock in small parcels to the citizens of the country.

In five years from now the stock of the Steel Trust and of many other big trusts will be owned by forty or fifty millions of the country's inhabitants. The small citizen who has saved a few hundred dollars will have the money in steel, or sugar, or railroad, or telephone trust stocks.

Then, when a trust is hurt and its stocks go down there will come a roar from the hundreds of thousands of small stockholders.

When the trusts shall have distributed their holdings among the voting pockets of the nation their squeezing of the public will mean a little more on their stock. And this little more interest will make the individual stockholders forget that it represents extortion and an increase in the price of the necessaries of life for all their fellow citizens.