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.

To begin this great task with the machinery of transportation was the first clear duty. Scarcely one of the gigantic abuses can be touched apart from these highways of distribution. We have but just waked up to the plain stupidity of giving away so recklessly all sorts of franchise grants, and are beginning to see the equal stupidity of parting madly with such an overwhelming part of the main and primary sources of wealth—mines, forests, water-power, oil deposits, and ground areas in large towns. These are the sure nesting-places of monopoly, and therefore, of all the fantastic extremes of wealth which make puppets of our politicians and set before the youth of the nation snobbish and materialistic ideals. This policy, be it remembered, does not ask, as the socialists do, for all forests, all mines, or all the water-power. It asks that the hand of government control be kept firmly upon such portions of these resources as are susceptible to vicious monopoly. All this is possible