pered, your politics will be corrupted by bribery and fraud, and your people will have to pay unnecessarily high prices for these kinds of service, and service of a poor quality."

Mr. Johnson is not in any sense an apostle of physical revolution or indeed of revolution of any kind. "I would not," he says, "advocate any disregard of existing rights or any confiscation of existing property. It would be no violation of existing rights for cities to erect their own plants and to compete for the business, as they could readily and successfully do with the present private owners. It would be no violation of existing rights for cities to use their tax power so as to compel the present private owners to bear the same proportion of public burden according to the value of their property, including franchises which owners of other kinds of private property have to bear. It would be no violation of existing rights for the cities or states to regulate fares and rates of compensation so as to make them yield only a fair return on the actual investment made rather than upon a fictitious capitalization based mainly upon franchises or special privilege value. In short, municipalities ought not to hesitate what private persons in business do as a matter of They should take advantage of every right that is left to themselves to get rid of the present system and substitute therefor a regime of public ownership and operation."

course.

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Of the transportation monopolies, which include freight lines, sleeping car companies, express and telegraph companies, Mr. Johnson, for the sake of greater clearness, restricts himself to railroads alone. What he says on that subject may be quoted here for its application to other forms of monopoly. After dwelling briefly upon the sequence of events by which the railroads, from being in their original public highways like wagon roads, have come to be regarded as private highways subject to private ownership and control. Mr. Johnson proceeds to the next step in railroad history, namely, the combination of lines into systems and of small systems into great ones. "This centralizing movement," he says, "has within the past decade proceeded so fast that now substantially the whole railroad business of the United States is under the control of a score of men. This is a natural process. Concentration means greater economy in operation and greater public facilities, and must occur wherever railroad development is given free play under present conditions, whether under private ownership or under public ownership, as in continental Europe and Australia."

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"But let us anticipate the end of this perfectly natural tendency. We must see the appearance of one directing mind, the kingpin, the dictator, the supreme monarch in the railroad world. Compare in your mind's eye the powers of such a man with the powers of the President of the United States. Who would command more men? Who receive the larger revenues? Who have the greater control of the pockets of the people? In short, whose, favors would be more courted? Which would have the dominant power-the man representing the people or the man representing privilege; the one voted for by men or the one voted for by shares of stock?"

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Concerning the efficacy of existing legislation, Mr. Johnson then asks, "Can interstate commerce commissions prevent these conditions? Why, railroad owners themselves cannot prevent it, for it is in the natural order. If government control failed before railroads were consolidated, what can it do after consolidation is perfected? If discriminating rates have worked such evils on trade in the past, what must be their effect in the future? If railroads have hitherto controlled legislation, what will they do when all their power is vested in one man?"

What then is the remedy? Socialism, as Mr. Johnson points out, would put all production and distribution in the hands of government. The philosophy of the "natural order," he says, which, unlike socialism, has for its object to promote competition and place as little power as possible in the hands of the government, would seek the remedy in throwing the steam highways open to general use. He can see why socialists point to railroad centralization under present conditions as the "greatest standing indictment of the competitive system." He can even understand why they insist that, competition having broken down, the only alternative of present railroadism, is government ownership and operation. But, he says, "We of the 'natural order' recognize that these evils flow from a denial of competition and demand simply the abolition of governmental favor as the source of the evil. They condemn the natural order of competition; we condemn privilege, a law-made advantage."

Railroad taxation affords another glaring example of inequality. "Assuming the railroads of the State to be valued at sixty per cent of the market value of their securities, it will be found that they pay less than four-tenths of one per cent in taxes. This discrimination in favor of railroad property is almost universal in the United States. In the State of Michigan, under what is called a specific tax on earnings, it is even

greater than in New York. The reason for this is that large interests make the most persistent effort to shape or dodge the payment of their fair share of taxation."

own.

Mr. Johnson's ideas as to the remedy for these manifest evils are his In some respects they go beyond the limits of practicable reform set by the progressive Democracy. But his conclusions are already instructive, and his strictness upon the evils of special privilege as applied to the labor problem will commend themselves to any patriotic American. "Governmental favors such as we have seen," he says, "force men into an unnatural competition with each other for the opportunity to employ themselves; whereas the opening up of nature's store-house to laborers would so multiply opportunities that wages would naturally rise. For just in proportion as monopoly takes less of the product of labor, there will be more to divide as înterest to capital and as wages to labor. The demands of privilege work against men in two ways. They create conditions in which production is lessened, and of this smaller production, they take a constantly increasing share. We advocates of the natural order see in the evils of trusts conditions that in good times force willing men into idleness, in bad times cause the strike, the lockout and the army of unemployed, and at all times work to produce the pauper and the tramp."

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CHAPTER X.

THE PROBLEM OF MONOPOLY

Regarding the larger question of the government ownership of telegraphs and similar utilities of national importance, it might seem almost needless to urge its desirability upon the American people but that this Republic is far behind other nations of its own rank in this important reform. Moreover, our people have remained so long in the grasp of a skillful and persistent plutocracy that they are even now prey to the delusion that the suggestion that they should own and operate their own most important properties is only a specious plea of "socialists."

In Europe the idea of government ownership of the telegraphs and even the railways has been made familiar by many years of successful experience. England operates its postoffice, not only in respect of the carriage of letters, but also of the transmission of parcels and telegrams. We permit our own postoffice to carry the mails, but at the beck and call of three or four express companies (one of which is represented in the Senate by a Republican leader of that body) we delegate the important parcels post to these private corporations and tamely submit to their exactions. The telegraph business is already a private monopoly extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to Mexico. Its tariffs are such as are needed to pay dividends upon a hundred millions of largely watered stock. Yet we have made little or no progress toward taking over this enormous business for our own profit and convenience, though it is of quite as confidential a character and just as properly a governmental function as the carriage of sealed letters.

Even in England, where the plutocracy is the paramount power of the land, a suggestion to take the telegraphs out of the postoffice department and place them under private control would not be entertained for a moment.

For that matter, what would be said, even in the United States, if it were suggested that the public water works, the postoffice, the public streets and bridges, parks, libraries, schools, armies and navies were given into the hands of private corporations? Who would dare suggest that we turn over the army to an Elkins-Widener syndicate, or the navy

to a Gould corporation, or the public courts to the Standard Oil trust, or the highways and schools to Mark Hanna? Yet such retrogressive movement in the direction of private ownership would not be in the least degree more absurd than are the arguments matle in favor of arresting the movement towards public ownership of other equally obvious public utilities.

Even to this day, we are sometimes told that the government ownership and control of public utilities would speedily result in increased political corruption. A sufficient answer to this is the successful ownership and operation by the government of its own postoffice, one of the most important and, even under the corrupt McKinley administration, the best conducted branches of the government. If the people can own and operate their own postoffice without undue scandal, why not also their telegraphs and their parcels express? The answer is so convincing on its face that it need scarcely be dwelt upon.

And those who advance even these feeble arguments forget, or assume to forget, for the moment, the unspeakable scandal which has attended the construction and operation of the railroads and telegraphs in the United States. Which of these great corporations is without offense in this regard? Which of them has been built without the attending taint of Wall Street jobbery, of watered stock, of bribed Legislators and Congressmen? Has it not been said, and with perfect truth, that the financial conduct of our railroads, attended as it was by so many wrecks of private fortunes, so many blasted reputations, became in time a stench in the nostrils even of the money world? While there has been some improvement in recent years as the owners of these properties became rich enough to afford to be honest, it is still true that European financiers regard them askance, and on the foreign bourses "American railroads" were for many years a synonym for jobbery and corruption. What branch of the public administration has been attended by such scandals as these?

No intelligent American can be ignorant of the existence at Washington and in the respective State capitals of the all-powerful lobby which watches every statute directly or indirectly affecting the great corporate interests. This evil had its beginning from the very moment when public utilities began to be turned over to private ownership. From the very start projectors of railroads and telegraphs and transportation companies of all kinds have been alert for the "protection" of their interests, and with increasing years have become more and more unscru