THE TRUSTS AND THE TARIFF WITH CHAPTERS ON THE RAILROAD PROBLEM AND MUNICIPAL MONOPOLIES BY GEORGE L. BOLEN New York: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY SET UP AND ELECTROTYPED JUNE, 1902. PRESS OF LANCASTER, PA. Reclass, 2-21-30 A.V.M.. PREFACE. This book is written with the belief that there is no sufficient reason why sound knowledge of the trusts and the tariff should continue to be confined so narrowly to the few. To understand these, which, with connected topics, are the most important questions of the day – political, economic, and social—the average man of some education does not seem to lack capacity. The merchant, the wage worker, or the farmer, discerns keenly the slightest change for better or worse in the conditions by which he is directly affected. Could he not carry his thinking to causes further back-to conditions that affect him less closely? When evil, the former conditions, such as an ordinary fall in wages or profits, are temporary, and can be improved, by moving or by varying one's effort; but the latter conditions, after a lapse of time not very long, as when changing methods gradually take away a person's occupation, are of momentous permanence, and when not foreseen may hold him down inexorably. Among the socially beneficent changes of the latter class are others, continually approaching, which are portentous to all, and which are only to be prevented by timely action from the many. Not only ought the average man to carry his thinking further, to become more intelligent in citizenship and more capable in business, but it seems that he desires to do so. As far as leisure permits, he reads the mass of matter placed before him, and with an intention to know, as well as to be entertained. Is not his lack of economic |