President Taft and the Great Combines
By Editor
President Taft and the Great Combines.—On August 23 President Taft spoke to the veterans of the Civil War at their reunion in Rochester, New York. He appealed to them in behalf of the peace negotiations in progress between this country and France and Great Britain. Incidentally he turned aside from his peace talk to say that the greatest problem since the dark days in which those veterans figured in ’61 was the proper regulation of the people of great wealth. Some of his reported words are: These new evils growing out of concentration of wealth, and the combinations which have practically controlled the market through a great reduction of the cost of production, have invited from the active-minded of to-day suggestions of remedies that are so extreme that the medicine, to many of us, seems worse than the disease. Those who are charged with the responsibility and sobered with the difficulties find ourselves in the middle of the road, resisting the tendency to Socialism on the one hand, and the inertia of reactionary contentment with present evils and the ambition for greater concentration of financial power on the other.