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than facing all these angry forces with no plan. It is easier to spendthan not to spend. It is running with the tide, along the lines ofleast resistance. And hence Mr. Roosevelt did what the premiers ofEurope had been doing for decades. Only he called it a New Deal.Ill · The Righteous AutarchyTHE LAST SEVENTY YEARS of American history have been astruggle between the ideal of "free enterprise" and the determinationto restrain and regiment it. Beginning with institutions likethe Interstate Commerce Commission and the Sherman Anti-TrustLaw, the public set out to "regulate" industry and followed thatsoon with the state regulation of public-utility monopolies. Businessleaders called this interference in business. Actually it was not.It was precisely the reverse. Business itself comprises the whole immenseweb of producing and distributing enterprises. Some men, forvarious reasons, set out to interfere in the natural workings of thisimmense organism. They organized first trade associations, thensecret combinations, then trusts, then holding companies, thencartels to control production, distribution, trade practices. Someof this proceeded from sheer greed and predatory ambition. Butsome of it also took its rise in the effort of producers to protectthemselves from the unruly hazards of trade. Thus the first combinationsin oil were formed not by Rockefeller and the refiners butby the little producers in the oil regions who wanted to protectthemselves from overproduction which forced the price of oil downto fifty cents a barrel when they thought by combination they couldkeep it to five dollars.Rockefeller took the same course, uniting the bigger men withmore brains, more capital, and more combining power to do thesame thing for the refiners, but more intelligently. That feverish,helter-skelter, and dramatic episode of American business between1870 and 1911 was not what so many have painted it—a mere assaultby rapacious men upon the nation's wealth. It was that, but189