XI. THE LAWS OF MODERN COMPETITION.

Can it be true that the conditions of modern civilization necessitates our subjection to monopolies, and that all our vaunted progress in the arts of peace only brings us nearer to an inevitable and deplorable end, in which a few holders of the strongest monopolies shall ride rough shod over the industrial liberties of the vast mass of humanity? Were this true, perhaps we had better take a step backward; relinquish the factory for the workshop, the railway for the stage-coach. "Better it is to be of an humble spirit with the lowly, than to divide spoil with the proud." But the law we have found commits us to no such fate. We cannot, indeed, abolish the causes of monopolies. We cannot create new gifts of Nature, and it would be nonsense to attempt to bring about an increase in the number of competing units and a decrease in the capitalization of each by exchanging our factories and works of to-day for the workshops of our grandfathers. But while monopolies are inevitable, our subjection to them is not inevitable; and when the public once comes to fully understand that the remedy for the evils of monopoly is not abolition, but control, we shall have taken a great step toward the settlement of our existing social evils. To discuss the details of the remedy, so far as it can be done in a volume of this sort, belongs properly to a later chapter. Before undertaking it, however, it seems well to devote some further attention to the evils which the attempt to abolish monopolies and adhere to the ideal system of universal competition has brought upon us, and to make, also, some further study of the general evils due to monopoly.