People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 January 1896 — Danger of the Trusts. [ARTICLE]

Danger of the Trusts.

Mayor Pingree, of ’Detroit, not a populist, but a republican, in a speech made a few days ago at Ypsilanti, spoke as follows regarding trusts. We commend it to the consideration of our republican friends, and hope they will ask themselves what their party is doing to save the country from such dangers: ‘.‘A trust fears neither God nor man. It is merciless and arrogant. It laughs at the law. Whenever the officers of the government have dared to prosecute a trust, the proceedings of the court read like a farce. The time will come, if things continue as at present, when the profits of the merchantile business of the United States will go to less than 100 persons, and all others will act sifnply as agents and consumers “These vast accumulations of wealth are more dangerous to the liberties of our republic than if all the anarchists, socialists and nihilists of Europe were let loose on our shores. It will not mend matters, nor can it stifle the conscience of those who, after having become wealthy by robbery and wrong doing, try to compromise with the Almighty by endowing a university or building a library. These will be but monuments to tell future generations that the income of such a man was 810,000,000 a year, and that to reach this figure he had desolated more homes and ruined more men than Goth of Vandal. The poor and honest laborer is more to be envied than such a man.—Progressive Farmer.