ers.

More than twenty-five years after Marx made his great prediction,
there came to this country on a visit Mr. H.M. Hyndman, an English
economist who is also known as one of the foremost living exponents of
Socialism. The intensity of the competitive struggle was most marked,
but he looked below the surface and saw a subtle current, a drift
toward monopoly, which had gone unnoticed. He predicted the coming of
the era of great trusts and combines. Again the wiseacres in their
learned ignorance laughed and derided. The amiable gentleman who plays
the part of flunkey at the Court of St. James, in London, wearing
plush knee breeches, silver-buckled shoes and powdered wig, a
marionette in the tinseled show of King Edward's court, was one of the
wiseacres. He was then editor of the _New York Tribune_, and he
declared that Mr. Hyndman was a "fool traveler" for making such a
prediction. But in the very next year the Standard Oil Company was
formed!

So we have the trust problem with us. Out of the bitter competitive
struggle there has come a new condition, a new form of industrial
ownership and enterprise. From the cradle to the grave we are
encompassed by the trust.

Now, friend Jonathan, I need not tell you that the trusts have got the
nation by the throat. You know it. But there is a passage, a question,
in the letter you wrote me the other day from which I gather that you
have not given the matter very close attention. You ask "How will the
Socialists destroy the trusts which are hurting the people?"

I suppose that comes from your old associations with the Democratic
Party. You think that it is possible to destroy the trusts, to undo
the chain of social evolution, to go back twenty or fifty years to
competitive conditions. You would restore competition. I have
purposely gone into the historical development of the trust in order
to show you how useless it would be to destroy the trusts and
introduce competition again, even if that were possible. Now that you
have mentally traced the origin of monopoly to its causes in
competition, don't you see that if we could destroy the monopoly
to-morrow and start fresh upon a basis of competition, the process of
"big fish eat little fish" would begin again at once--_for that is
competition_? And if the big ones eat the little ones up, then fight
among themselves, won't the result be as before--that either one will
crush the other, leaving a monopoly, or the competitors will joi