The most obvious remedy for monopoly, and the one which has been tried and persevered in with the most remarkable faith, is the creation of new competitors. Does a railroad monopoly oppress us? Build a competing line. Is the gas company of our city charging us $3 per thousand for gas which cost but 50 cents to produce and deliver? Let us start another gas company and tear up all our pavements again to lay its mains. Has the sugar trust put up the price of sugar two cents per pound? Well, "sugar can be produced anywhere by the expenditure of labor and capital," the Trust's lawyers say, and so we will "trust" that some enterprising manufacturer will take the field against the combination. But if we do any of these things, we have added only one competitor to the number in the field. And with only two competitors in the field, competition is sure to be so intense and wasteful that the formation of a new monopoly is a matter of but a short time.
This is the conclusion to which the theory brings us; and the more one studies the history of actual attempts to create competition in this way, the more thoroughly convinced he must be that the inevitable result will be the same,—the tacit or formal combination between the old monopoly and the new competitor, resulting in the re-establishment of the absolute reign of monopoly. The author has thoroughly studied the actual working of hundreds of schemes, in every part of the United States, whose object was to create competition in railroad transportation. It is a most astonishing fact to see the eagerness with which thousands of municipalities, all over the country, which have taken great loads of debt upon their shoulders to secure "competing lines," and have seen these lines swallowed up by their rivals, are still anxious to repeat the folly and assume new burdens to aid in building new lines, which will inevitably be absorbed like those which they preceded. If the people as a whole learn wisdom by experience, they seem to learn with painful slowness. The first great lesson for the people who are groaning under the burden of monopoly to learn, then, is that when we try to defeat monopoly by creating new competing units, the remedy is worse for the community at large than the disease, and effects at best but a temporary relief.