p. 11 | Big Things

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jan 13, 1909

Big Things.

Attorney Charles S. Wheeler, in a recent speech before the Merchants' Association of San Francisco, pointed out, as many other thinking men are doing, the dishonesty that there is in commercial circles. His argument was that honor should be placed above dollars. Great organizations of capital and vast sums of money have lured people from honesty. He stated some very striking facts in his speech; namely, that in the thirty years between 1870 and 1900 America doubled her population; more than doubled her railway tonnage; increased her interlake traffic thirty-one times; her petroleum output eleven times; her steel product 153 times; her total exports 256 per cent; while the export of manufactories increased 535 per cent. In 1870 the wealth of this country was estimated at thirty thousand million dollars; in 1890 it was sixty-five thousand million; in 1900 it was ninety-four thousand million. With all this has come the big corporations—a condition, not a theory—and either it must be controlled or killed. To declare an industrial war, too, was almost worse, and inflicted almost as much suffering as an actual conflict of arms under old conditions. Think of one corporation alone—the United States Steel—having over 200,000 employees, making with their families nearly one million people dependent upon that one corporation.