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