this as a basis, it is probable that the total annual cash cost of
strikes in the United States is twenty or twenty-five million dollars.
The results of these strikes in decreasing the purchasing power of
employes and thus causing overproduction, and in discouraging enterprise
and increasing the cost of capital, serve to spread their effect
throughout the whole industrial community and thus cause an actual loss
and injury many times that borne by the parties directly engaged.

It is thus evident that the waste due to the intense competition which
the concentration of productive enterprise has brought about in modern
times is a matter of startling proportions. We are wasting and
destroying wealth all the time sufficient to go a long way towards
abolishing all the poverty in our midst; and the blame for this state of
affairs we are now able to place where it belongs.

Surely with a full appreciation of these evils, every honest and
patriotic man must be willing to use every endeavor to strike at the
root of the evil. The public indeed is, and has long been, a unit in its
opposition to monopoly; but in endeavoring to defeat monopoly it has
taken just the course which could give no permanent gain. Cities have
beggared themselves to aid competing railway lines only to see them
consolidated eventually with the monopoly which it was expected to
defeat. The multitude regard Claus Spreckels as a benefactor--and will
till he forces the Sugar Trust to divide their 25 per cent. profits with
him in return for the control of his refinery.

It is no benefit to us if in steering away from the Scylla of monopoly,
we be wrecked on the Charybdis of wasteful competition. We have been
trying for a score of years now to defeat monopolies by creating
competition; but in spite of a universal public sentiment in favor of
the reform, and notwithstanding the millions of wealth which we have
poured out like water to accomplish this object, monopolies to-day are
far more numerous and powerful than ever before. The people who are
groaning under their burden of oppression are anxious for relief. The
remedy they have so long and faithfully tried to apply has but made a
bad matter worse; and it is small wonder that, despairing of other
relief, they are adopting false and injurious plans for bettering
themselves which serve merely to extend the monopoly policy into all
industrial affairs.

We are threatened with a state of society in which most of t