The Bureau of Corporations has published elaborate reports on such industries as petroleum (Standard Oil Company), beef, tobacco, steel, and harvesting machinery, which are indispensable in studying these great basic enterprises.

The American habit of legislative investigation and trust-fighting in the courts, whatever its public value may have been, has at least had the result of piling up mountains of material for the historian of American industry.

For one single corporation, the Standard Oil Company, a great library of such literature exists.

The nearly twenty volumes of testimony, exhibits, and briefs assembled in the course of the Federal suit which led to its dissolution is the ultimate source of material on America's greatest trust.

As most of our other great corporations--the Steel Trust, the Harvester Company, the Tobacco Company, and the like--have passed through similar ordeals, all the information the student could ask concerning them exists in the same form.