The Attorney-General of the national government gives a large part of
his annual report for 1893 to showing "what small basis there is for
the popular impression" "that the aim and effect of this statute" (the
Anti-Trust Law) "are to prohibit and prevent those aggregations of
capital which are so common at the present day, and which sometimes
are on so large a scale as to practically control all the branches
of an extensive industry." This executive says of the action of the
"co-ordinate" Legislature: "It would not be useful, even if it were
possible, to ascertain the precise purposes of the framers of the
statute." He is the officer charged with the duty of directing the
prosecutions to enforce the law; but he declares that since, among
other reasons, "all ownership of property is a monopoly, ... any
literal application of the provisions of the statute is out of the
question." Nothing has been accomplished by all these appeals to the
legislatures and the courts, except to prove that the evil lies deeper
than any public sentiment or public intelligence yet existent, and is
stronger than any public power yet at call.
What we call Monopoly is Business at the end of its journey. The
concentration of wealth, the wiping out of the middle classes, are
other names for it. To get it is, in the world of affairs, the chief
end of man.
There are no solitary truths, Goethe says, and monopoly--as the
greatest business fact of our civilization, which gives to business
what other ages gave to war and religion--is our greatest social,
political, and moral fact.
The men and women who do the work of the world have the right to the
floor. Everywhere they are rising to "a point of information." They
want to know how our labor and the gifts of nature are being ordered
by those whom our ideals and consent have made Captains of Industry
over us; how it is that we, who profess the religion of the Golden Rule
and the political economy of service for service, come to divide our
produce into incalculable power and pleasure for a few, and partial
existence for the many who are the fountains of these powers and
pleasures. This book is an attempt to help the people answer these
questions.
