fulfill their
responsibilities without some system of detailed censure and supervision
they should be entirely dispensed with. It may be added that if the
proposed or any kindred method of reorganization becomes politically and
economically possible, the circumstances which account for its
possibility will in all probability carry with them some practicable
method of realizing the proposed object.

Wherever the conditions, obtaining in the case of railroad and public
service corporations, are duplicated in that of an industrial
corporation, a genuinely national economic system would demand the
adoption of similar measures. How far or how often these measures would
be necessarily applied to industrial corporations could be learned only
after a long period of experimentation, and during this period the
policy of recognition, tempered by regulation under definite conditions
and graduated taxation of net profits would have to be applied. But when
such a policy had been applied for a period sufficiently prolonged to
test their value as national economic agents, further action might
become desirable in their case as in that of the railroads. The
industrial, unlike the service corporations, cannot, however, be
considered as belonging to a class which must be all treated in the same
way. Conditions would vary radically in different industries; and the
case of each industry should be considered in relation to its special
conditions. Wherever the tendency in any particular industry continued
to run in the direction of combination, and wherever the increasingly
centralized control of that industry was associated with a practical
monopoly of some mineral, land, or water rights, the government might be
confronted by another instance of a natural monopoly, which it would be
impolitic and dangerous to leave in private hands. In all such cases
some system of public ownership and private operation should, if
possible, be introduced. On the other hand, in case the tendency to
combination was strengthened in an industry, such, for instance, as that
of the manufacture of tobacco, which does not depend upon the actual
ownership of any American natural resources, the manner of dealing with
it would be a matter of expediency, which would vary in different cases.
In the case of a luxury like tobacco, either a government monopoly might
be created, as has been already done so frequently abroad, or the state
might be satisfied with a sufficient