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."

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