te of production which is not solely a product of
human labor"; Sturtevant says "a monopoly is such a control of the
supply of any desirable object as will enable the holder to determine
its price without appeal to competition." To the first definition we
object that it is both narrow and indefinite. The second seems to omit
such important classes of monopolies as the combinations to limit
competition; and Sturtevant's definition is unscientific in this: Hardly
any monopoly exists whose holders can without limit determine the price
of its product. If the price continues to rise, competition in some form
will appear. Take, for example, the business of transporting goods from
New York to San Francisco; if all the railway lines combine to form a
monopoly, the competition of ocean steamers via Panama would eventually
stop the rise in rates, if no other outside competition stopped it
before. The owners of a rich mine have a real monopoly, though they
cannot raise the price above a certain point without being undersold by
the owners of poorer mines or those more remote from market.
Consideration of these facts lead us to construct the following
definition: _A monopoly in any industry consists in the control of some
advantage over existing or possible competitors by which greater profits
can be secured than these competitors can make._ For the law of
monopolies we have: _The degree of a monopoly depends upon the amount of
advantage which is held over existing or possible competitors._ When the
advantage of the monopoly is so great that no other competitor will try
to do business in competition with it, we may rightly say that
competition is dead. The great share of the monopolies which are based
on this seventh law of competition, those due to the control of natural
agents, only restrict competition by the attainment of an advantage over
their competitors, and do not destroy it.

The principal natural agents which are necessary to production, and
whose supply may be so limited to cause an appreciable monopoly, are:
(1) Land for agricultural purposes; (2) land for purposes of manufacture
or commerce; (3) transportation routes, such as mountain passes, room
for railway tracks in a city street, or for gas-and water-pipes beneath
its surface; (4) natural deposits of minerals and metals; (5) sources of
water supply or water power. (The latter is unimportant now compared
with a score of years ago, because of the lessened cost of its