will have to be accepted with
the defects of its qualities. Its characteristic qualities are held to
be good, acceptable to the tastes of modern men whose habits of thought
have been standardised in its terms; and it would be only reluctantly
and by tardy concession that these modern men could bring themselves to
give up that scheme of "Natural Liberty" within the framework of which
runs this competitive system of business management and its wasteful
manifolding of half-idle equipment and nugatory work. The common man, at
the worst, comforts himself and his neighbour with the sage reflection
that "It might have been worse." The businessmen, on the other hand,
have also begun to take note of this systematic waste by duplication
and consequent incompetence, and have taken counsel how to intercept the
waste and divert it to their own profit. The businessmen's remedy is
consolidation of competing concerns, and monopoly control.

To the common man, with his preconceptions on the head of "restraint of
trade," the proposed remedy seems more vicious than the evil it is
designed to cure. The fault of the remedy plainly is not that the
mismanagement of affairs due to competitive business can not be
corrected by recourse to monopoly, but only that the community, it is
presumed, would still suffer all the burdens and discomforts of the
regime of competition and sabotage, with, possibly, further
inconveniences and impositions at the hands of the businesslike
monopoly; which, men are agreed, may fairly be depended on to use its
advantage unsparingly under the business principle of charging what the
traffic will bear.

There is also this other singular phenomenon in this modern industrial
world, that something not very far short of one-half the industrial
equipment systematically lies idle for something approaching one-half
the time, or is worked only to one-half its capacity half the time; not
because of competition between these several industrial concerns, but
because business conditions will not allow its continued productive use;
because the volume of product that would be turned out if the equipment
were working uninterruptedly at its full capacity could not be sold at
remunerative prices. From time to time one establishment and another
will shut down during a period of slack times, for the same reason.

This state of things is singular only as seen from the point of view of
the community's material interest, not that it is in