profit when we were selling at actual loss.
I dropped fifty thousand dollars in that venture. Most of us went
bankrupt.* The dairymen were wiped out of existence."

* Bankruptcy--a peculiar institution that enabled an
individual, who had failed in competitive industry, to
forego paying his debts. The effect was to ameliorate the
too savage conditions of the fang-and-claw social struggle.

"So the Trust took your profits away from you," Ernest said, "and you've
gone into politics in order to legislate the Trust out of existence and
get the profits back?"

Mr. Calvin's face lighted up. "That is precisely what I say in my
speeches to the farmers. That's our whole idea in a nutshell."

"And yet the Trust produces milk more cheaply than could the independent
dairymen?" Ernest queried.

"Why shouldn't it, with the splendid organization and new machinery its
large capital makes possible?"

"There is no discussion," Ernest answered. "It certainly should, and,
furthermore, it does."

Mr. Calvin here launched out into a political speech in exposition of
his views. He was warmly followed by a number of the others, and the cry
of all was to destroy the trusts.

"Poor simple folk," Ernest said to me in an undertone. "They see clearly
as far as they see, but they see only to the ends of their noses."

A little later he got the floor again, and in his characteristic way
controlled it for the rest of the evening.

"I have listened carefully to all of you," he began, "and I see plainly
that you play the business game in the orthodox fashion. Life sums
itself up to you in profits. You have a firm and abiding belief that
you were created for the sole purpose of making profits. Only there is a
hitch. In the midst of your own profit-making along comes the trust
and takes your profits away from you. This is a dilemma that interferes
somehow with the aim of creation, and the only way out, as it seems to
you, is to destroy that which takes from you your profits.

"I have listened carefully, and there is only one name that will
epitomize you. I shall call you that name. You are machine-breakers. Do
you know what a machine-breaker is? Let me tell you. In the eighteenth
century, in England, men and women wove cloth on hand-looms in their own
cottages. It was a slow, clumsy, and costly way of weaving cloth,
this cottage system of manufacture. Along came the steam-engine and
labor-saving machinery. A thousand looms