ruggle with actual warfare, so far as
concerns the mental agony and physical suffering which attended the
struggle, and the misery which overwhelmed the defeated and those
dependent on them. Now nothing about your age is, at first sight, more
astounding to a man of modern times than the fact that men engaged in
the same industry, instead of fraternizing as comrades and co-laborers
to a common end, should have regarded each other as rivals and enemies
to be throttled and overthrown. This certainly seems like sheer
madness, a scene from bedlam. But more closely regarded, it is seen to
be no such thing. Your contemporaries, with their mutual
throat-cutting, knew very well what they were at. The producers of the
nineteenth century were not, like ours, working together for the
maintenance of the community, but each solely for his own maintenance
at the expense of the community. If, in working to this end, he at the
same time increased the aggregate wealth, that was merely incidental.
It was just as feasible and as common to increase one's private hoard
by practices injurious to the general welfare. One's worst enemies
were necessarily those of his own trade, for, under your plan of
making private profit the motive of production, a scarcity of the
article he produced was what each particular producer desired. It was
for his interest that no more of it should be produced than he himself
could produce. To secure this consummation as far as circumstances
permitted, by killing off and discouraging those engaged in his line
of industry, was his constant effort. When he had billed off all he
could, his policy was to combine with those he could not kill, and
convert their mutual warfare into a warfare upon the public at large
by cornering the market, as I believe you used to call it, and putting
up prices to the highest point people would stand before going without
the goods. The day dream of the nineteenth century producer was to
gain absolute control of the supply of some necessity of life, so that
he might keep the public at the verge of starvation, and always
command famine prices for what he supplied. This, Mr. West, is what
was called in the nineteenth century a system of production. I will
leave it to you if it does not seem, in some of its aspects, a great
deal more like a system for preventing production. Some time when we
have plenty of leisure I am going to ask you to sit down with me and
try to make me comprehend, as I ne