. Provided he exacts from consumers of his goods only the
natural returns which business yields, year in and year out, he can
sell all that his mills produce with no danger that the foreigner will
supplant him. The other twenty per cent of duty enables him to add a
monopolistic profit to his prices. He can raise them by about that
amount above what is natural before the foreigner will begin to make
him trouble.

We have seen what ways the trust has of stifling competition within
the limits of our own country. There are the favors which it is able
to get from the railroads, and there is the practice of selling its
goods in some one locality at a cut-throat rate whenever a competitor
appears in that locality. There is the so-called factors' agreement,
which often forces merchants to buy goods of a certain class
exclusively from the trust. By these means and others the trust makes
it perilous to build a mill for the purpose of competing with it. If,
indeed, it makes its prices very high, some bold adventurer will build
such a mill and take the chances that this entails; but if the trust
stops short of offering such a tempting lure in the way of high
prices, it can keep the field to itself. If the extra duty of twenty
per cent--the unnecessary portion of the whole duty of forty per
cent--did not exist, nothing of this sort would be possible. The trust
would have to sell at a normal price in order to keep out the
foreigner, and so would its independent competitor. Both the
combination and its rivals could make their goods and sell them in
security. The industry, as such, is protected by the duty of twenty
per cent, and it is the additional duty which is the protector of
monopoly--the enabling cause of the grab which the trust can make from
the pockets of the consuming public.

In practice one would not try to make the figures quite as exact as is
implied in the statement that just twenty per cent of duty is needed
to protect the industry as such from the foreigner, and that just
another twenty per cent acts as a maker of a monopolistic price. It
would be impracticable to fix the duty in such a way as exactly to
meet the need of protection. Owing to fluctuations in values, the duty
might be made slightly higher than is necessary under normal
conditions. All these things would have to be considered by a
competent tariff commission. The figures we here use are illustrative
only; but the principle is as clear as anything in ec