Flower Trust

What is so noxious as a Trust? When the late Theodore Roosevelt was shaking his Big Stick at the meat trusts, the steel trusts, the oil trusts, every newspaper in the land published a picture of a Trust so that people would know one when they saw it. A Trust, cartoonists made clear, was a bloated figure with a pork barrel body, huge watchchain (labeled "Profits"), smoking with incredibly gross lips a big cigar (labeled "Luxury"), and crushing beneath its heel a pathetic lizard-sized person (labeled "Consumer"). Since 1905, that figure has appeared more and more rarely, but last week he suffered a recrudescence. He was called "Flower Trust." U. S. Attorney Buckner of Southern New York, brought action under the Sherman Law to dissolve an alleged combination of flower growers in a dozen states and 40 wholesale dealers in flowers. It was claimed this was organized to compel the people of Manhattan to buy only hothouse flowers, thus cutting out of the market the flowers of the woods and fields.