comes the duty of a new administrative body. Such an agency is the logical outcome of a policy to restore sound competitive conditions to the field of commerce. To make effective this method of keeping competitive business within legal limits the Federal Trade Commission is authorized (1) to investigate interstate corporations, excepting banks and common carriers; (2) to make recommendations for the readjustment of the business of any corporation alleged to be violating the anti-trust acts; (3) to act thus as a master in chancery for the purpose of ascertaining and reporting an appropriate form of decree in equity suits for relief; finally, (4) the Commission is authorized to extend its investigation into trade conditions in and with foreign countries where trade practices may affect the foreign trade of the United States.

Thus the Federal Government in its administrative capacity enters upon the policy of the guardianship of the conditions of competition which make for freedom and fairness. By doing this it not only cuts out the worst curse of national commerce but it also sets up a tribunal before which business may seek to learn the salutary paths of constructive competition.

6. New Wine in New Bottles

Nor is the trust solution mainly a matter of schoolmaster's rules to insure good behavior. It is rather a question of the spirit of right

management and just relations. A new wine is tingling in the veins of modern humanity, and it cannot but mean new bottles new mentalities and new attitudes, as well as a new order under old legal forms. Neither combination nor competition need be regarded as an exhausted asset of industrial society. If by combination we secure the highest economy, efficiency, and freedom in specific fields of public service, then let us promote it within recognized standards of fairness in costs and services. On the other hand, so long as competition tends, in the opinion of society, not only to utilize the aggregate product of the community to advantage, but also tends, on the whole, to make the price of different articles proportionate to the expenses of producing them (Hadley), then let us proceed to emancipate that principle of private enterprise as part of the program of national policy.

Competition to serve its purpose and natural functions must be normalized. Each age must decide what these limits are. Faith in its complement combination-has often been misplaced because of the general misconception of what true competition is. So much of what has passed as such lies outside of the truly economic, ethical, or legal criteria of the genuine. Hence, it has come to be regarded as immoral and destructive in its purposes, and its essential characteristic of service has been obscured. But, says Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes:

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"True competition looks to the invention and introduction of more and more comprehensive ideas. It results in the upbuilding of emulation and cooperation and always, taking one period with another, to the furtherance of the general interest. The ordinary notion of competition takes account of numbers only. I regard the customary thinking here as a sort of atheism. Competition, rightly understood, is rivalry in the service of one's fellows. Men can not compete save with reference to a common end."*

As things stand now "Big Business" need not necessarily go. But it is on trial. If it is to stay, on what condition may it persist? On condition that corporate organization develop a type of service in commercial, financial, and industrial as well as in public utility fields, capable of appreciating and respecting the right of the public, both as consumer and investor, to have commodities and services supplied at reasonable prices and rates. The older right of exploitation must defer to the newer duty of service on fair terms. More and more it is coming to be recognized that the progress of society in wealth and welfare is due not alone nor even chiefly to any few men nor any class of interests. It is the joint resultant of the cooperation of all economic groups of the community working through division of labor applied in special fields.

For this type of economic service some cor* Private Letter to Franklin Ford, New York.

porations may have to be disintegrated. But, given economic freedom, the main thing is to arrive at a resultant in which each working group will recognize some approach to justice in its share in the national income. Whatever in public policy and private effort makes for that end will work toward a right solution. But the solution is not wholly a question of the distribution of the national dividend. It is at the same time a question also of the kind of public attitude which such division of wealth engenders. For that reason modern peoples have no more fundamental problem before them than that of balancing their material prosperity with the prevailing demands of social justice. In the realm of practical government there are few tasks more persistent, especially among peoples whose national spirit is of the progressive type. It is that type which profits by comparing its conditions of well-being at any one time with what they were in the past, and with what these conditions are in other communities and nations today. The spirit of comparative research has made the prevailing sense of justice a progressive concept of the popular consciousness. This attitude finds expression in discussion, in investigation, in legislation, and in administration. And, because of this, the problem of adjusting outward prosperity with inward contentment becomes the really great work of modern statesmanship.

Finally, this is the problem which the trusts

have brought to contemporary Democracy. In working it out we are still in the stage of investigating their merits and shortcomings. The disintegration of the most dominant ones probably has contributed more to the discovery of a practicable method of dealing with the problem of monopoly than to any other result. These dissolutions were carried out under writ of injunction, providing for prompt correction of what had been adjudged as a wrong, under peril of receivership control. But they have also been the occasion of bridging the gulf between progressive competition and reactionary monopoly. Guided by the principles of equity, the courts have found in the morals of business practice the means of opening the highway of corporate progress. Any ultimate solution of the trust question must recognize this result as the open gate to the future of industry and trade in America. It means that our courts have found a method of insuring the potentiality of competition in private enterprise without destroying the corporation disposed to be amenable to the settled convictions of business morality. And they do this by taking away the potentiality of the trusts to interfere unduly with the freedom of economic opportunity.

But the elimination of monopoly from the private combination is only half of the problem. The conservation of competition within fair limits is equally vital. For that end, among