reasonable level is not sufficient comfort for the consumers who are paying exorbitant prices this year. The fact that a trust in one industry charges reasonable prices in order to ward off competition will not quiet the complaints of the consumers of the products of another combination which adopts the opposite policy. There can be no conclusive generalization from experience regarding the effect of combinations upon prices, still less regarding the ability of combinations to maintain monopoly prices in the absence of unfair competition and special privileges. For this there are several reasons. In the first place, there has been no complete investigation of the multitude of trusts and pools. The thoro investigations of the Bureau of Corporations have covered only a half dozen industries. Other less elaborate investigations, official or private, have been made, but the results of most of them are inconclusive. Many fields have not been touched at all. In the second place, law and public opinion have had an important effect in restraining the monopoly power of trusts and pools. Up to about fifteen years ago, there were very few trusts. The pool was the common form of combination. Even before the enactment of the Sherman law in 1890, and of the various state antitrust acts, most of which were passed at about that date, pooling agreements were void and unenforceable under the common law. There was nothing to prevent their members from breaking away. Since the passage of the anti-trust acts, pools have been criminal as well as unenforceable. If pooling were legalized, if pool agreements were made enforceable, the power of pools might be much greater than it has been in the past. that competitors will not be tempted to come into the field. Experience lends some support to this position. Many a pool has gone to pieces in the past as the result of the attempt to maintain exorbitant prices. Not a few among the trusts have a smaller proportion of the business in their fields today than they had at the time of their organization. Others have maintained moderate prices. It is perfectly true, moreover, that the trusts which have been most powerful have been those which used unfair competitive practices or possessed natural or patent monopolies. The Standard Oil Company, for example, has almost continuously been able, throughout the greater part of the country, to extort prices far above a normal competitive level. The Standard Oil Company has probably outdone every other combination in unfair competitive practices. It has also been aided by the element of natural monopoly in pipe-line transportation and in tank-wagon delivery. It must be conceded, then, that the power of a combination, merely as such, to maintain monopoly prices is not without limit. Competition is a restraining influence. But those who would have us keep hands off the trusts and pools must prove much more than this. They must prove that it is possible to prevent combinations from using unfair competitive methods and to deprive them of special sources of monopoly power. They must prove that, if this is accomplished, the combinations will possess practically no monopoly power whatever, that on the average and in the long run they can maintain prices no higher than would prevail if combinations were destroyed. The fact that competition will bring down prices next year to a reasonable level is not sufficient comfort for the consumers who are paying exorbitant prices this year. The fact that a trust in one industry charges reasonable prices in order to ward off competition will not quiet the complaints of the consumers of the products of another combination which adopts the opposite policy. There can be no conclusive generalization from experience regarding the effect of combinations upon prices, still less regarding the ability of combinations to maintain monopoly prices in the absence of unfair competition and special privileges. For this there are several reasons. In the first place, there has been no complete investigation of the multitude of trusts and pools. The thoro investigations of the Bureau of Corporations have covered only a half dozen industries. Other less elaborate investigations, official or private, have been made, but the results of most of them are inconclusive. Many fields have not been touched at all. In the second place, law and public opinion have had an important effect in restraining the monopoly power of trusts and pools. Up to about fifteen years ago, there were very few trusts. The pool was the common form of combination. Even before the enactment of the Sherman law in 1890, and of the various state antitrust acts, most of which were passed at about that date, pooling agreements were void and unenforceable under the common law. There was nothing to prevent their members from breaking away. Since the passage of the anti-trust acts, pools have been criminal as well as unenforceable. If pooling were legalized, if pool agreements were made enforceable, the power of pools might be much greater than it has been in the past. In any case, we cannot judge the monopoly power of the trusts from past experience with the pools. From the trust no member can possibly break away. But we have had no adequate test of the monopoly power of trusts unrestrained by law. Practically the entire history of the trusts is comprised in the period since the Sherman act was passed. They have operated under the ban of law. That fact has affected their price policies and their policies with respect to the acquisition of competitors. The effect must have been appreciable even in the earlier days, when the anti-trust laws were not being actively enforced. It has been powerful during more recent years, when suits in equity and indictments against trusts have been almost weekly events. The trusts have not dared to fight their competitors so vigorously or to annex them so freely as they would have done in the absence of restrictive legislation. They have hardly dared to maintain prices as high as they have had power to do. They have feared dissolution. They have feared criminal prosecution. They have desired to curry public favor with a view to securing amendments making the laws less rigid. What they would or could do if given free rein cannot be judged by past experience. In the third place, a satisfactory study of the effect of trusts and pools on prices during recent years is made particularly difficult by the extraordinary changes which have taken place in industry generally. There was from 1897 until a year or two ago a long period of high prosperity, of rapidly advancing prices, and of rapid changes in methods of production, not merely in trust controlled industries, but in industries generally. It is, therefore, quite impossible in most cases to determine the effect of a trust on prices by merely comparing the prices before and after the formation of the trust. It is necessary in each case to enter into the most elaborate details as to the prices of materials, the rates of wages, the methods of production and the movements of demand. Some have sought to measure the influence of trusts merely by comparing the movement of prices in industries in which trusts exist with that in other industries. The prices of farm products are often used for such comparison. On the average the prices of agricultural products have advanced more than those of trust-made articles. Comparisons of this sort, however, prove absolutely nothing. The disparity between the growth of population and that of agricultural production has caused an extraordinary increase in the prices of farm products. Of course other factors besides the presence or absence of combinations affect the relative price movements of individual commodities or groups of commodities. Under conditions of freest competition the price of one product may go up while that of another goes down, or the price of one may go up far faster than that of the other. The sole question at issue is whether the price of the particular commodity made by a particular trust has gone up more or has fallen less than it -would have done in the absence of combination. That question, as already suggested, can be settled, if at all, only by the most elaborate investigations. Finally, even if we possessed far more information than we do on the history of prices under trusts and pools, we should still be unable to determine satisfactorily to what extent such power as these combinations were found to possess over prices was attributable to unfair competitive methods or to special privileges such |