Aroused. THE TRUST PROBLEM. The past two years has witThe People nessed the greatest amalgamation of capital the world has ever known, and this combining of wealth has been peculiarly American. We have had the oil trust with us for years; the whiskey trust, the tobacco trust, the sugar trust, and a host of other trusts followed at intervals, but during the past two years there seems to have been a rush for all the leading industries to combine, each along its special line. The formation of trusts produce three results of especial importance: First, it regulates capitalization, placing it in the power of the promoters of trusts to fix their capital at any fictitious amount their financial interests would require; second, it places the power of regulating the wages of employes in the hands of the trusts, the only relief possible to employes being a strike, which the national and state authorities aid in suppressing; third, competition being eliminated, the price of products to the consumer is arbitrarily fixed by the trusts, except when a low tariff, or no tariff, admits foreign goods in competition. Conservative minds predict that the methods of the trusts will wreak their ruin. In the matter of capitalization it is predicted that the day will come. and that day not far distant, when innocent purchasers of fictitious securities will demand returns that cannot be provided and receiverships will follow. one after another, until the whole loosely built structure will come tumbling down, carrying the country into bankruptcy. Others say that when these gigantic combinations exercise the power they possess by reducing wages a strike of such magnitude will result that it will be near akin to a revolution, which when suppressed will bear as aftermath legislation which will carry us far along the way to socialism. There are those who say that the trusts will be the death of the protective tariff, that the people will soon realize that they are being robbed by the beneficiaries of their benevolence. When once it is known that American trusts charge the American people fifty per cent. more for a product than they charge people of foreign lands, simply because a fifty per cent. import duty gives them that power, then the American people will remove that import duty, foreign competition will reduce prices and the sales of the trusts which, in turn, will make it impossible to pay dividends on the colossal fictitious capilization that was made possible by the protection of the custom house. A few students of political economy advance the idea that the era of trusts vice and as beneficial results in all industries as they now enjoy in their postoffice, public schools and city fire departments. is but a step toward state socialism, that when each industry has but one executive head the people will find it necessary to go into the trust business themseves, and government bonds will be exchanged for trust securities. It is claimed that the beneficent results of the first experiment will be a revelation and one after another of the great industries will pass into the hands of the people. These economists predict that the fierce war of individualism and The pen drawing is from a photograph of the Paris, showing wrecking tugs endeavoring to pull her off the rocks. The object on the left, just below the horizon, is the wreck of the Mohegan, the English ship foundered on the Manacles, October 14, 1898. competition that has racked the social and financial world for so long will at once be placed in the same niche of memory with the feudal system of the Dark Ages. It is promised that the capitalist will find contentment during his remaining days in clipping coupons from the government bonds which he has received in exchange for his trust stock; that the labor problem will have been settled with justice to all; that the people will secure as efficient ser up to the enlarged Carnegie Company, is grossly over-capitalized; and it is a fact, also, that instead of being content to make more money by economies of management, and the other legitimate means within their reach, they have elected to "get there" by the device of raising prices against the conhave been raised 68 per cent. since the end sumer. Among other things, wire nails of last year, cut nails 63 per cent., bar iron at Pittsburg 58 per cent., and tank steel plates at Philadelphia 76 per cent. Tin plates on December 31 stood at $2.75 per per box, an advance of 30 or 40 per cent. since the incorporation of the combine in |