The Conflict between Private Monopoly and Good Citizenship

We, too, know these truths about the monopolies; but we still hesitate, – we still act as if we didn't "more'n half believe it." But if the monopoly as such is not an evil, – if the evil is the practice of political abuse by irresponsible private ownership, – what are our alternatives when the question of remedies is raised? Are we forced to the logic of the socialist, – that the city or state should take these monopolies out of the categories of private property, owning and managing them directly for the people? The socialist tells us that these combined interests in transportation – mines, oil, timber, etc. – have become a power with which city and state cannot cope; that we are at the present moment governed by these monopoly interests, and shall continue so to be governed until the state has absolute possession of them.

To this claim of the socialists, one reply is obvious. Every immediate political duty now before us is committed to the principle of regulation. For some years we are going to try that. We are not going to assume that mines, oil, timber, elevators, and our vast transportation system with its connecting monopolies, are all to be taken under state proprietorship and managed as our postal system is now managed. For any future worth discussing, we are going to use our strength to regulate these monopolies in the public interest. In that decade when the people are at last convinced that these monopolies are more powerful than government; that we have no hope of curbing them into obedience before the law, – in that decade the cry will go up for government ownership on a scale far wider than that of railways and telegraphs.

At this point I do not wish to hedge or shuffle. That the younger of my hearers will see far more government and city ownership than we now have, seems to me so obvious that the discussion of it is not even interesting. Our government must have an economic basis strong enough and broad enough to give it footing against all unfair private monopoly. But this degree of government ownership does not land us in Socialism. It may, indeed, protect us from every dangerous excess which Socialism carries with it.

When the German government secures a large mining property with the distinct understanding that, if necessary, it shall be worked in the public interest to break a private coal monopoly, we have an illustration of one step which our own government ought also to take. The object, in this case, is not to go into a new business, but to break monopoly power, actual or threatened. Or consider that brave experiment station, New Zealand! Her Compulsory Arbitration may fail; she may be forced to an industrial pace slower than we like; but the main purpose of her social policy is sound to the core; and we are now trying clumsily to imitate it. Yet we are still afraid – we "don't more'n half believe it." Her purpose is to use the power of city and state in New Zealand to prevent the private fleecing of the people through monopoly. Whether it is her land policy or her insurance policy, the aim is to check at their source inherent monopoly abuses.

One is forever hearing that New Zealand is being given over hand and foot to Socialism. The only trouble with the statement is that it is not true. If you tax a vast estate down there so that it must be cut into small holdings upon which some twenty times more people can live than lived on the private estate, and if this added population is encouraged to win more and more interest and profit-bearing forms of wealth, you have a situation in which the thoroughpaced socialists may be entirely out of the game.

The essence of the socialist's logic is, that all interest on money and all profits on goods made for the market (as well as all rent) are inherently vicious and antisocial so long as they drop into private pockets. There is no distinction between the greedy abuses of capitalism through organized privilege and the possible uses of capitalism under regulation.

But think of this issue as we may, we are as a fact now committed to regulation – committed to a long and hard struggle to bring monopoly evils under social control. This is now our situation and our problem.

Yet how easy it is to put these evils into phrases! How hard it is to relate ourselves to definite and effective proposals for the elimination of the evils! Such proposals have nevertheless been at last put before us with coherence and with deliberation. They have been put before the American people with a clearness which cannot be shirked without bad faith on our part. They have been brought within the sphere of practical politics, where their decision now waits upon the choice of the people as a whole.

This commanding policy for future as well as for present interests, for the entire people as well as for the few, has been stated in its integrity in two messages from President Roosevelt. Men may differ about the Philippines; about our military and naval ambition; about nature-fakirs and race-suicide; but about the ordered and constructive purpose to curb the abuses of our ill-regulated private monopolies, there should be no disagreement among sane and disinterested men. No one has ever yet shown genius enough to do disagreeable duties agreeably to all men. To the end of time, if we ourselves are inconvenienced, we shall probably say: "Of course this thing ought to be done, – but it should be done in some other way." The various methods of railroad regulation may irritate us, but that the railroad must be brought so far under public control as to obey the law and serve all men with approximate fairness, no human being who is intellectually and morally awake can longer deny.