surrender his property to the creditor at the creditor's price, is a wonder beside which Aladdin's lamp burns dim.

As I have already remarked, I apprehend that sovereignty is a variable quantity of administrative energy, which, in civilizations which we call advancing, tends to accumulate with a rapidity proportionate to the acceleration of movement. That is to say, the community, as it consolidates, finds it essential to its safety to withdraw, more or less completely, from individuals, and to monopolize, more or less strictly, itself, a great variety of functions. At one stage of civilization the head of the family administers justice, maintains an armed force for war or police, wages war, makes treaties of peace, coins money, and, not infrequently, wears a crown, usually of a form to indicate his importance in a hierarchy. At a later stage of civilization, companies of traders play a great part. Such aggregations of private and irresponsible adventurers have invaded and conquered empires, founded colonies, and administered justice to millions of human beings. In our own time, we have seen the assumption of many of the functions of these and similar private companies by the sovereign. We have seen the East India Company absorbed by the British Parliament; we have seen the railways, and the telephone and the telegraph companies, taken into possession, very generally, by the most progressive governments of the world; and now we have come to the necessity of dealing with the domestic-trade monopoly, because trade has fallen into monopoly through the centralization of capital in a constantly contracting circle of ownership.

Among innumerable kinds of monopolies none have been more troublesome than trade monopolies, especially those which control the price of the necessaries of life; for, so far as I know, no people, approximately free, have long endured such monopolies patiently. Nor could they well have done so without constraint by overpowering physical force, for the possession of a monopoly of a necessary of life by an individual, or by a small privileged class, is tantamount to investing a minority, contemptible alike in numbers and in physical force, with an arbitrary and unlimited power to tax the majority, not for public, but for private purposes. Therefore it has not infrequently happened that persistence in adhering to and in enforcing such monopolies has led, first, to attempts at regulation, and, these failing, to confiscation, and sometimes to the proscription of the owners. An example of such a phenomenon occurs to me which, just now, seems apposite.

In the earlier Middle Ages, before gunpowder made fortified houses untenable when attacked by the sovereign, the highways were so dangerous that trade and manufactures could only survive in walled towns. An unarmed urban population had to buy its privileges, and to pay for these a syndicate grew up in each town, which became responsible for the town ferm, or tax, and, in return, collected what part of the municipal expenses it could from the poorer inhabitants. These syndicates, called guilds, as a means of raising money, regulated trade and fixed prices, and they succeeded in fixing prices because they could prevent competition within the walls. Presently complaints became rife of guild oppression, and the courts had to entertain these complaints from the outset, to keep some semblance of order; but at length the turmoil passed beyond the reach of the courts, and Parliament intervened. Parliament not only enacted a series of statutes regulating prices in towns, but supervised guild membership, requiring trading companies to receive new members upon what Parliament considered to be reasonable terms. Nevertheless, friction continued.

With advances in science, artillery improved, and, as artillery improved, the police strengthened until the king could arrest whom he pleased. Then the country grew safe and manufactures migrated from the walled and heavily taxed towns to the cheap, open villages, and from thence undersold the guilds. As the area of competition broadened, so the guilds weakened, until, under Edward VI, being no longer able to defend themselves, they were ruthlessly and savagely plundered; and fifty years later the Court of King's Bench gravely held that a royal grant of a monopoly had always been bad at common law.^[4]

Though the Court's law proved to be good, since it has stood, its history was fantastic; for the trade-guild was the offspring of trade monopoly, and a trade monopoly had for centuries been granted habitually by the feudal landlord to his tenants, and indeed was the only means by which an urban population could finance its military expenditure. Then, in due course, the Crown tried to establish its exclusive right to grant monopolies, and finally Parliament--or King, Lords, and Commons combined, being the whole nation in its corporate capacity,--appropriated this monopoly of monopolies as its supreme prerogative. And with Parliament this monopoly has ever since remained.

In fine, monopolies, or competition in trade, appear to be recurrent social phases which depend upon the ratio which the mass and the fluidity of capital, or, in other words, its energy, bears to the area within which competition is possible. In the Middle Ages, when the town walls bounded that area, or when, at most, it was restricted to a few lines of communication between defensible points garrisoned by the monopolists,--as were the Staple towns of England which carried on the wool trade with the British fortified counting-houses in Flanders,--a small quantity of sluggish capital sufficed. But as police improved, and the area of competition broadened faster than capital accumulated and quickened, the competitive phase dawned, whose advent is marked by Darcy v. Allein, decided in the year 1600. Finally, the issue between monopoly and free trade was fought out in the American Revolution, for the measure which precipitated hostilities was the effort of England to impose her monopoly of the Eastern trade upon America. The Boston Tea Party occurred on December 16, 1773. Then came the heyday of competition with the acceptance of the theories of Adam Smith, and the political domination in England, towards 1840, of the Manchester school of political economy.

About forty years since, in America at least, the tide would appear once more to have turned. I fix the moment of flux, as I am apt to do, by a lawsuit. This suit was the Morris Run Coal Company v. Barclay Coal Company,^[5] which is the first modern anti-monopoly litigation that I have met with in the United States. It was decided in Pennsylvania in 1871; and since 1871, while the area within which competition is possible has been kept constant by the tariff, capital has accumulated and has been concentrated and volatilized until, within this republic, substantially all prices are fixed by a vast moneyed mass. This mass, obeying what amounts to being a single volition, has its heart in Wall Street, and pervades every corner of the Union. No matter what price is in question, whether it be the price of meat, or coal, or cotton cloth, or of railway transportation, or of insurance, or of discounts, the inquirer will find the price to be, in essence, a monopoly or fixed price; and if he will follow his investigation to the end, he will also find that the first cause in the complex chain of cause and effect which created the monopoly in that mysterious energy which is enthroned on the Hudson.

The presence of monopolistic prices in trade is not always a result of conscious agreement; more frequently, perhaps, it is automatic, and is an effect of the concentration of capital in a point where competition ceases, as when