We long ago passed beyond the modest notion of "protecting"
the industries of the country and moved boldly forward to the idea that
they were entitled to the direct patronage of the Government. For a long
time--a time so long that the men now active in public policy hardly
remember the conditions that preceded it--we have sought in our tariff
schedules to give each group of manufacturers or producers what they
themselves thought that they needed in order to maintain a practically
exclusive market as against the rest of the world. Consciously or
unconsciously, we have built up a set of privileges and exemptions from
competition behind which it was easy by any, even the crudest, forms of
combination to organize monopoly; until at last nothing is normal,
nothing is obliged to stand the tests of efficiency and economy, in our
world of big business, but everything thrives by concerted arrangement.
Only new principles of action will save us from a final hard
crystallization of monopoly and a complete loss of the influences that
quicken enterprise and keep independent energy alive.
It is plain what those principles must be.
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