The Conflict between Private Monopoly and Good Citizenship

This shell-game has gone on decade after decade, so gayly that it seems as if it were a delight to the American people to have their pockets picked. And yet, let us say it over and over again, the pocket-picking is not the worst of it. That the people's money should be used to debauch their own chosen representatives in city and state legislatures is the uttermost evil. Part and parcel of the uttermost evil is the resulting suspicion and distrust that eat their way deep through the masses of the wage-earning world. Not to mention their own trade papers, or the socialistic sheets with the scandals of high and low finance, wage-earners have only to read the capitalistic sheets, presidential messages, and summarized reports from scores of legislative committees, in order to believe that almost everything investigated – insurance, city traction companies, mining syndicates, railway finance – is heavy with rottenness. Any one interested enough to run through the files of the distinctively labor press at the present moment, will find a body of convinced opinion about those who control us industrially that has an extremely ugly look. The labor-world is drawing the only natural inference it can from the data given.

How often we have seen within a year or two the lament that the efficiency of labor has lessened in many of our great industries! What in Heaven's name can we expect? If that labor-world believes what is everywhere cried on the housetops about the crooked exploiting devices of these monopolies, why should not its interest and its fidelity fall off? The law of cause and effect will work here as it works elsewhere in the universe. Labor is learning that unfair industrial privilege flouts every essential principle of democratic government. The real iniquity of it is hidden from us until we see that secrecy, cunning, and unscrupulousness may be good pecuniary assets. Yes, this has to be plainly stated. A man who should happen to have the people's interest really at heart could not be an active partner in the worst of these monopolies. The unscrupulous, the men bent upon the stock-watering game and their own immediate enrichment, would crowd the honest men to the wall. Every line of least resistance is with the get-rich-quick type of manager. To hold his power and to corrupt us politically; to appropriate continuous unearned increment through overcapitalization, he must work not for the public good, but largely against it. In most free competitive business there is no such inherent antagonism between private and public good.

The privileged monopoly is found not only in the lighting and transportation combinations in cities like New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Chicago: it is in a whole nest of industries – oil, mining, and timber – which are interknit with our railroad system.

Here is the real antagonism between monopoly and good citizenship. Anthracite coal is not a business apart – it is a railroad business; and if there are abuses, they cannot be corrected apart from railroad regulation. There is nothing that we now need to know so thoroughly as that the railroad is the one key to the control of all monopolies, including those that often last just long enough to gut the properties according to get-rich-quick principles. The waste of the public wealth under this concentrated stimulus is the darkest economic fact, as the ugliest political fact is the corruption of officials and legislators. Think of a product so vital to the future as the forests; and then picture, if you can, the waste and despoiling of this strictly common wealth that has gone on, and still goes on, in connection with unregulated railroad affiliations, – properties, larger than several Eastern states, stolen, and then burned, and skinned, and devastated, so that two generations cannot repair the loss! And now by highest federal authority we are warned that our timber supply cannot last twenty-five years without a new controlling policy.

Yet it is not, of course, the monopoly that is the evil. It is solely the way in which we have allowed the monopolies to be owned and controlled. We have admitted a kind of irresponsible proprietorship that has so debased political methods in the United States that we are made at the present moment (in this one respect) a warning to the world.

Last year a social investigator returned from New Zealand. He said: "I found their able men chiefly anxious to avoid the example of the United States. Their problem is to develop a rich and prosperous industrial life, but escape the rottenness of American politics. Whether they succeed or fail, their purpose is great." Their plan is to use the strength of the government to prevent the formation of private monopolies such as have debauched our politics until we have become a mockery among the nations.

How long we ourselves have talked of political corruption as if it were separable from the privileged monopolies in business! That we now see this sorry partnership as it is, and are daily more and more aroused by it, and bent on its dissolution, is the surest sign of progress, as it is the surest sign that democracy need not fail.

Again and again we wonder how long it will require for the sovereign people to learn a lesson so simple. How many more facts or revelations do we need?

The other day a liberal theologian told me that he had been preaching some elemental truths about a larger religious life. A sturdy old listener, who knew they were truths, but didn't quite like to adjust himself, said to the preacher: "I guess that's all true that you've been preaching; but – I don't more'n half believe it."