e monopolies; but we still
hesitate,--we still act as if we didn't "more'n half believe it." But if
the monopoly as such is not an evil,--if the evil is the practice of
political abuse by irresponsible private ownership,--what are our
alternatives when the question of remedies is raised? Are we forced to
the logic of the socialist,--that the city or state should take these
monopolies out of the categories of private property, owning and
managing them directly for the people? The socialist tells us that these
combined interests in transportation--mines, oil, timber, etc.--have
become a power with which city and state cannot cope; that we are at the
present moment governed by these monopoly interests, and shall continue
so to be governed until the state has absolute possession of them.

To this claim of the socialists, one reply is obvious. Every immediate
political duty now before us is committed to the principle of
regulation. For some years we are going to try that. We are not going to
assume that mines, oil, timber, elevators, and our vast transportation
system with its connecting monopolies, are all to be taken under state
proprietorship and managed as our postal system is now managed. For any
future worth discussing, we are going to use our strength to regulate
these monopolies in the public interest. In that decade when the people
are at last convinced that these monopolies are more powerful than
government; that we have no hope of curbing them into obedience before
the law,--in that decade the cry will go up for government ownership on
a scale far wider than that of railways and telegraphs.

At this point I do not wish to hedge or shuffle. That the younger of my
hearers will see far more government and city ownership than we now
have, seems to me so obvious that the discussion of it is not even
interesting. Our government must have an economic basis strong enough
and broad enough to give it footing against all unfair private monopoly.
But this degree of government ownership does not land us in Socialism.
It may, indeed, protect us from every dangerous excess which Socialism
carries with it.

When the German government secures a large mining property with the
distinct understanding that, if necessary, it shall be worked in the
public interest to break a private coal monopoly, we have an
illustration of one step which our own government ought also to take.
The object, in this case, is not to go into a new business