he properties
according to get-rich-quick principles. The waste of the public wealth
under this concentrated stimulus is the darkest economic fact, as the
ugliest political fact is the corruption of officials and legislators.
Think of a product so vital to the future as the forests; and then
picture, if you can, the waste and despoiling of this strictly common
wealth that has gone on, and still goes on, in connection with
unregulated railroad affiliations,--properties, larger than several
Eastern states, stolen, and then burned, and skinned, and devastated, so
that two generations cannot repair the loss! And now by highest federal
authority we are warned that our timber supply cannot last twenty-five
years without a new controlling policy.

Yet it is not, of course, the monopoly that is the evil. It is solely
the way in which we have allowed the monopolies to be owned and
controlled. We have admitted a kind of irresponsible proprietorship that
has so debased political methods in the United States that we are made
at the present moment (in this one respect) a warning to the world.

Last year a social investigator returned from New Zealand. He said: "I
found their able men chiefly anxious to avoid the example of the United
States. Their problem is to develop a rich and prosperous industrial
life, but escape the rottenness of American politics. Whether they
succeed or fail, their purpose is great." Their plan is to use the
strength of the government to prevent the formation of private
monopolies such as have debauched our politics until we have become a
mockery among the nations.

How long we ourselves have talked of political corruption as if it were
separable from the privileged monopolies in business! That we now see
this sorry partnership as it is, and are daily more and more aroused by
it, and bent on its dissolution, is the surest sign of progress, as it
is the surest sign that democracy need not fail.

Again and again we wonder how long it will require for the sovereign
people to learn a lesson so simple. How many more facts or revelations
do we need?

The other day a liberal theologian told me that he had been preaching
some elemental truths about a larger religious life. A sturdy old
listener, who knew they were truths, but didn't quite like to adjust
himself, said to the preacher: "I guess that's all true that you've been
preaching; but--I don't more'n half believe it."

We, too, know these truths about th