ever owning; nevertheless, they are a
part of a general policy of regulation and a means of escape from a
policy of ownership. The selling of coal by the state may help to keep
independent manufacturing alive, and carrying by the state may do so
in a more marked way. If so, these measures have a generally
anti-socialistic effect, since they obstruct that growth of private
monopoly which is the leading cause of the growth of socialism.

_Evils within the Modern Corporation._--The great corporation brings
with it some internal evils which might exist even if it never
obtained a monopoly of its field. In this class are the injuries done
by officers of the corporation to the owners of it, the stockholders.
A typical plundering director has even more to answer for by reason of
what he does to his own shareholders than because of what he and the
corporation may succeed in doing to the public. In the actual amount
of evil done, the robbing of shareholders is less important than the
taxing of consumers and the depressing of wages, which occur when the
effort to establish a monopoly is successful; but in the amount of
iniquity and essential meanness which it implies on the part of those
who practice it, it takes the first rank, and its effect in perverting
the economic system cannot be overlooked. The director who buys
property to unload upon his own corporation at a great advance on its
cost, or who alternately depresses the business of his corporation and
then restores it, in order that he may profit by the fall and the rise
of the stock, not only does that which ought to confine his future
labors to such as he could perform in a penitentiary, but does much
to vitiate the action of the economic law which, if it worked in
perfection, would give to the private capitalist a return conformable
to the marginal product of the capital he owns. A sound industry
requires that the state should protect property where this duty is now
grossly neglected.

If more publicity will help to do this,--if lighting street lamps on a
moral slum will end some of the more despicable acts committed by men
who hold other men's property in trust,--sound economics will depend
in part on this measure, but it depends in part on more positive ones.

The investment of capital is discouraged and an important part of the
dynamic movement is hindered wherever shareholders are made insecure;
and therefore the entire relation of directors to those whose propert