f production, and not only allow the
general income to be large and grow larger, but do everything that they
possibly can do to make it grow larger. It is an unjust act to reduce
general earnings, even though no one is singled out for particular
injury. On this ground we insist on trust legislation, tariff reform,
the conservation of natural resources, etc. I am prepared to claim that
it is in this spirit that we demand that private initiative, which has
given us the amount of prosperity that we have thus far obtained, shall
be enabled to continue its work without being supplanted by monopoly.
In a general way I should include public monopoly as well as private
among the things which would put a damper on the progress of
improvement and lessen the income on which the comfort of laborers in
the near future will be dependent. Monopoly of any sort is hostile to
improvement, and in this chiefly lies the menace which it holds for
mankind.

It is a fairly safe prediction that, if a public monopoly were to exist
in every part of the industrial field, the _per capita_ income would
grow less, and that it would be only a question of time, and a short
time at that, when the laborers would be worse off than they are now.
Though, at the outset, they might absorb the entire incomes of the
well-to-do classes, the amount thus gained would shrink in their hands
until their position would be worse than their present one. They would
have pulled down the capitalists without more than a momentary benefit
for themselves and with a prospect of soon sinking to a lower level
than as a class they have thus far reached.

The impulse to revolutionize the system comes from the belief that it
is irreclaimably bad. The first thing to be done is to see how much
reclaiming the system is capable of; and the only sure way to test this
question is to use all our power in the effort to improve it. When all
such efforts shall have failed, it will be time for desperate measures.

Our industrial system has many faults:--here we are happily agreed. It
is the inferences we draw from this fact that are different. The one
that I draw is like one which is recorded in a famous case in
antiquity. When the Macedonian armies seemed about to overwhelm Greece,
Demosthenes encouraged the Athenians by this very sound bit of
philosophy: "The worst fact in our past affords the brightest hope for
our future. It is the fact that our misfortunes have come because of
our own