The Conflict between Private Monopoly and Good Citizenship

I make no use here of theory. I am thinking of definite large business interests in which the evil will remain as common as it is inevitable so long as the business is unregulated and its shady practices concealed from public authorities and public opinion. In some of our huge concerns it is the traditional procedure to bring the various heads of departments together at regular intervals and pit them against each other as if running a race for life. What is the showing that each can make against the other? Has this one cut down the cost of his product; has he reduced this or that item of expenditure; has he got the most out of the workmen under his charge; has he been able to dodge practical difficulties – legal, sanitary, or any other – that stood in his way?

In this relentless contest before their superiors, the foreman or agent learns that the one key to favor and advancement is that no other shall make a better showing. If he can safely get this superior result out of his labor group, that is one way; if he can reach his end by introducing children under age, or by any other questionable device, the temptation is there in the subtlest form it can assume for the average man. When, recently, a swarm of sharp practices came out in another of the great concerns whose products reach half the homes of the nation, the man at the top doubtless told the truth when he replied: "In my position, it is not my business to know those details. I have no time except for the results sent in." Thus the president or director stands apart from and above this underworld of tolerated illegalities.

Here, then, are three reasons for lack of obedience to the law, – the long border struggle, the excessive concentration upon wealth-exploitation, and the ways through which successful subordinates are rewarded in severely competitive industries.

But another, weightier reason must now be added, – namely, our private monopolies with their influence and reactions on our whole community life. In the earlier and looser stages of development, when vast resources still remain unappropriated, private monopoly may aid a city or a nation. At first no public protection of fish and game is necessary, but the pressure of population will eventually compel a common rule to which the individual must submit. As surely as a growing town sooner or later requires a common water-supply, a common drainage, common sanitary provisions, and regulated hack charges, just so surely will the private monopoly somewhere and at some time require strict social control, – that is, control from the point of view of all of us and not from that of a few money-makers. A generation ago the stripping of our forests did not matter vitally. The interests that were to suffer from this stripping had not appeared. To-day a forestry policy derived absolutely from the common, social point of view has become a necessity so commanding that the nation's attention is at last caught. A generation ago no one had even guessed at the franchise-value of our streets, – not even those of New York city. After Jacob Sharp had made these values known, a struggle began which reads like an Arabian tale. It is a story of business and political corruption that has gone on in varying degrees in scores of our cities and in scores of great industries where strong men have been fighting to get control of mines, forests, lands, and oil, the development of which depended on favorable transportation. The carrying trade – whether of goods or people – is never to be omitted in this story. Until very recent years, this mother of monopolies, the railroad, was thought of as a purely private possession. A dozen years ago one of our ablest railroad lawyers (often before the United States Supreme Court with great cases) told me it had long been one of his intellectual amusements to try to force into the heads of railroad presidents the fact that their ownership of that kind of property was profoundly different from the ownership of a horse or a grocery store. "I finally," he said, "had to give it up." It meant nothing to them that society had given them stupendous privileges which qualified their ownership. These franchise-grants once in their pockets, everything that was built upon them came to be used in any conceivable game to enrich the owner.

Properly informed persons no longer discuss whether it is right and moral to allow railroad magnates to do as they like – to act as if these properties were strictly a private possession. We know, at last, how society has suffered from leaving this form of ownership so long without social control. We have seen the devastating conflict between unregulated possession of this kind of property and all the higher welfare of the community. If we add to the railway the common city monopolies of lighting and transportation; if we add industries in iron and steel, much of our mining, oil, and forest exploitation, all of which, in connection with railways, take on inevitably the form of monopoly, we have the whole buccaneer-group that has done upon our politics the deadly work, which we know so well that its retelling is a thing to avoid from very weariness.

Though a dozen other cities would serve as well, look for a moment at the monopoly of the New York street-railways. A people, careless and ignorant of their own interests, so far give away the rights in their streets, that a few men get them into their possession. With the grip once fast upon this power, it becomes not a machinery primarily to serve the people: primarily it becomes an enginery to filch vast unearned increments from the public. It becomes a device for gambling, with the dice so heavily loaded in your favor that you cannot lose. You change power from one kind to another; you merge one line with another or with the whole; you create holding companies; and at every change you recapitalize. Your million dollars is turned into five or ten or twenty millions, in order that multiplied dividends taken from the public may drop into private pockets. Every bit of bookkeeping meant for the public eye is a mass of jugglery. If you are frightened by the challenge of an indignant public, the most important records are destroyed. Surplus funds belonging to the stockholders are freely loaned to personal friends or put to private speculative ventures.