f the goods is kept alive. If we prevent the trust from
taking tribute from the purchasing public, we shall by the same means
prevent it from oppressing laborers and farmers.

_Why the Business of a Monopoly should never be regarded as a Private
Interest._--The people are already putting behind them and ought to
put completely out of sight and mind the idea that the business of a
monopoly is a private enterprise which its officers have a right to
manage as they please. A corporation becomes a public functionary from
the time when it puts so many of its rivals out of the field that the
people are dependent on it. As well might the waiter who brings food
to the table claim that the act is purely his own affair and that the
customers and the manager have no right of interference, however well
or ill the customers may be served, as a combination of packers might
claim that any important detail of their business concerns them only.
The illustration is a weak one; for in the case of a trust which
controls a product that is needed by the public, it is the full
majesty of the people as a whole which is in danger of being set at
naught. Such a company is a public servant in all essential
particulars, and although it is allowed to retain a certain autonomy
in the exercise of its function, that autonomy does not go to the
length of liberty to wrong the public or any part of it. The
preservation of a sound industrial system requires that governments
shall forestall injuries which the interests of the monopolistic
corporation impels it to inflict. No discontinuance of essential
services, no stinting of them, and no demand for extortionate returns
for them can be tolerated without a perversion of the economic system.
The natural laws we have presented will work imperfectly if, for
example, the danger of a coal famine shall forever impend over the
public or if this fuel shall be held at an extortionate price.
Workmen, indeed, have a larger stake than have others in the
maintenance of a fair field for competing producers and an open market
for labor, but other classes feel the vitiating of the industrial
system which occurs when the fair field and the open market are
absent.

_Why the Motive which once favored Non-interference in Industry by the
State now favors Interference._--We have said that what is needed is
vigorous action by the state in keeping alive the force on which the
adherents of a _laissez-faire_ policy rested their ho