in order to believe that almost everything investigated--insurance, city
traction companies, mining syndicates, railway finance--is heavy with
rottenness. Any one interested enough to run through the files of the
distinctively labor press at the present moment, will find a body of
convinced opinion about those who control us industrially that has an
extremely ugly look. The labor-world is drawing the only natural
inference it can from the data given.

How often we have seen within a year or two the lament that the
efficiency of labor has lessened in many of our great industries! What
in Heaven's name can we expect? If that labor-world believes what is
everywhere cried on the housetops about the crooked exploiting devices
of these monopolies, why should not its interest and its fidelity fall
off? The law of cause and effect will work here as it works elsewhere in
the universe. Labor is learning that unfair industrial privilege flouts
every essential principle of democratic government. The real iniquity of
it is hidden from us until we see that secrecy, cunning, and
unscrupulousness may be good pecuniary assets. Yes, this has to be
plainly stated. A man who should happen to have the people's interest
really at heart could not be an active partner in the worst of these
monopolies. The unscrupulous, the men bent upon the stock-watering game
and their own immediate enrichment, would crowd the honest men to the
wall. Every line of least resistance is with the get-rich-quick type of
manager. To hold his power and to corrupt us politically; to appropriate
continuous unearned increment through overcapitalization, he must work
not for the public good, but largely against it. In most free
competitive business there is no such inherent antagonism between
private and public good.

The privileged monopoly is found not only in the lighting and
transportation combinations in cities like New York, Philadelphia, St.
Louis, and Chicago: it is in a whole nest of industries--oil, mining,
and timber--which are interknit with our railroad system.

Here is the real antagonism between monopoly and good citizenship.
Anthracite coal is not a business apart--it is a railroad business; and
if there are abuses, they cannot be corrected apart from railroad
regulation. There is nothing that we now need to know so thoroughly as
that the railroad is the one key to the control of all monopolies,
including those that often last just long enough to gut t