our liberties.

To the practical mind, however, the question at once occurs, what light
have we gained toward the proper method of counteracting this evil? Can
it be true that the conditions of modern civilization necessitates our
subjection to monopolies, and that all our vaunted progress in the arts
of peace only brings us nearer to an inevitable and deplorable end, in
which a few holders of the strongest monopolies shall ride rough shod
over the industrial liberties of the vast mass of humanity? Were this
true, perhaps we had better take a step backward; relinquish the factory
for the workshop, the railway for the stage-coach. "Better it is to be
of an humble spirit with the lowly, than to divide spoil with the
proud." But the law we have found commits us to no such fate. We
cannot, indeed, abolish the causes of monopolies. We cannot create new
gifts of Nature, and it would be nonsense to attempt to bring about an
increase in the number of competing units and a decrease in the
capitalization of each by exchanging our factories and works of to-day
for the workshops of our grandfathers. But while monopolies are
inevitable, our _subjection_ to them is not inevitable; and when the
public once comes to fully understand that _the remedy for the evils of
monopoly is not abolition, but control_, we shall have taken a great
step toward the settlement of our existing social evils. To discuss the
details of the remedy, so far as it can be done in a volume of this
sort, belongs properly to a later chapter. Before undertaking it,
however, it seems well to devote some further attention to the evils
which the attempt to abolish monopolies and adhere to the ideal system
of universal competition has brought upon us, and to make, also, some
further study of the general evils due to monopoly.

XII.

THE EVILS DUE TO MONOPOLY AND INTENSE COMPETITION.

It is a strange thing when we come to analyze the various social evils
which demand our attention, and which every true man longs to cure, to
find how great a proportion can be traced back to the one great evil of
faulty competition. As a preliminary to a survey of these evils, in
order that we may understand the necessity that all good men and true
should exert themselves in applying the remedy, let us see just what
conditions of our industrial society we should seek to work toward. What
is the theoretical perfection of human industry?

Probably all thinking men, whatever the