ckedest monopoly on the face of this planet. Yet you never once
heard a voice raised yet against the company as a company. Individual
complaints get into the _Times_, of course, about the crowding of the
_train de luxe_, the breach of faith as to places, and the discomforts
of the journey; but never a glimmering conception seems to flit across
the popular mind that here is a Colossal Wrong, compared to which Monte
Carlo is but as a flea-bite to the Asiatic cholera. This chartered abuse
connects the three biggest towns in France--Paris, Lyon, Marseilles--and
is absolutely without competitors. It can do as it likes; and it does
it, regardless--I say "regardless," without qualification, because the
P.L.M. regards nobody and nothing. Yet one hears of no righteous
indignation, no uprising of the people in their angry thousands, no
moral recognition of the monopoly as a Wicked Thing, to be fought tooth
and nail, without quarter given. It probably causes a greater aggregate
of human misery in a week than Monte Carlo in a century. Besides, the
one is compulsory, the other optional. You needn't risk a louis on the
tables unless you choose, but, like it or lump it, if you're bound for
Nice or Cannes or Mentone, you must open your mouth and shut your eyes
and see what P.L.M. will send you. Our own railways, indeed, are by no
means free from blame at the hands of the Democracy: the South-Eastern
has not earned the eternal gratitude of its season-ticket holders; the
children of the Great Western do not rise up and call it blessed.
(Except, indeed, in the most uncomplimentary sense of blessing.) But the
P.L.M. goes much further than these; and I have always held that the one
solid argument for eternal punishment consists in the improbability that
its Board of Directors will be permitted to go scot-free for ever after
all their iniquities.

I am not wholly joking. I mean the best part of it. Great monopolies
that abuse their trust are far more dangerous enemies of public morals
than an honest gambling-house at every corner. Monte Carlo as it stands
is just a concentrated embodiment of all the evils of our anti-social
system, and the tables are by far the least serious among them. It is an
Influence for Good, because it mirrors our own world in all its naked,
all its over-draped hideousness. There it rears its meretricious head,
that gaudy Palace of Sin, appropriately decked in its Haussmanesque
architecture and its coquettish gardens,