Here is the second part of Judge Grosscup’s talk on
Anti-Trust Laws given in Chicago in October 1907, and lost until rediscovered
recently by CESJ researchers. Judge
Grosscup continued,
Our Legislation Wrong
in Principle
 |
| We should all fail like this. |
But though what I am saying means, perhaps, that the aim of
the American public thus far, in its treatment of incorporated industry, is not
directed toward the right mark, it does not mean, that in the great new
industrial life that this generation of men is living, so largely an
incorporated life, there is nothing that is wrong. Somewhere in that life,
something is wrong; for though in the midst of material prosperity, the country
is without contentment; and there must be something wrong in a prosperity that
does not bring contentment — something that, in the nature of things, in some
way pinches and wounds some deep-seated human instincts. Nor does it mean that
the administration of President Roosevelt has been a failure. As a preparation
of the public mind for the great practical thing yet to be accomplished, that
administration has been a great success.
Corporations
Represent Concentrated Control
 |
| Cadbury's had a form of worker ownership. |
What, then, is the wrong that lies at the bottom of the
popular disquiet, and what is the work yet to be done? I can best answer that
question, perhaps, in the statement of three facts. The first of these is: that
not only is the corporation to modern industry organized, what government is to
mankind politically organized, but, that as it is through effective free
government alone that political power is diffused among the people, it is
through the corporation alone that the ownership of the industries of the
country can ever be widely diffused among the people; for outside the field of
agricultural properties, property is not now held, each individual piece by
some individual man; between the man who seeks to own, and the thing to be
owned, there is, throughout the industrial field, the State-created
intermediary called the corporation.
(Tomorrow: “Diffusion of Wealth in the United States”)
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