he principal
industries will be wholly given over to monopoly. Those in each
occupation will band together to secure the greatest returns for
themselves at the expense of all other men; while the few occupations
which cannot thus combine in a monopoly--farming, and the different
sorts of unskilled labor--will be filled to overflowing with those
crowded out of other callings. Those who follow them will do so only
because the monopolized occupations are closed to them. Thus will our
farming population degenerate into a peasantry more miserable than that
of Europe, and our laborers be ground down to a level lower than they
have yet known. Is there a probability that such a state of affairs will
come to pass? There might be if the public were not keenly alive to the
curse of monopoly. But as it is, the greater danger is that through
ignorance a wrong course may be adopted for the cure of our present
evils, which will aggravate instead of curing them.

XIII.

AMELIORATING INFLUENCES.

If pure selfishness were the only motive influencing the masses of
mankind, the evils which we have considered in the preceding chapter
would be wholly unbearable. All men would be waging an industrial
warfare with each other in their greed for gain, just as the barons of
feudal times fought to satisfy their thirst for power and possessions;
and as motive is the great force which determines character, we would
be, as far as moral excellence is concerned, in the same category as the
uncivilized savages.

Fortunately for the happiness of the race, there are important
influences at work counteracting, modifying and ameliorating the social
evils that threaten us. These influences are not cures for these evils,
though they are so considered by very many people. But they are very
important palliatives. They are certainly of inestimable value in the
lack of real remedies; but it is better to consider them as palliatives
merely; for necessary, as they are and always will be, to soften and
relieve the ruggedness of human laws and human administration of law, in
the present condition of humanity they cannot effect a cure of the evils
which burden us.

The first of these palliatives has a purely selfish origin. It arises
from the desire of the managers of every monopoly to make the greatest
possible profit from its operations. Let us take, for example, a street
railway monopoly which is at liberty to charge such rates of fare as it
chooses