, but to break
monopoly power, actual or threatened. Or consider that brave experiment
station, New Zealand! Her Compulsory Arbitration may fail; she may be
forced to an industrial pace slower than we like; but the main purpose
of her social policy is sound to the core; and we are now trying
clumsily to imitate it. Yet we are still afraid--we "don't more'n half
believe it." Her purpose is to use the power of city and state in New
Zealand to prevent the private fleecing of the people through monopoly.
Whether it is her land policy or her insurance policy, the aim is to
check at their source inherent monopoly abuses.

One is forever hearing that New Zealand is being given over hand and
foot to Socialism. The only trouble with the statement is that it is not
true. If you tax a vast estate down there so that it must be cut into
small holdings upon which some twenty times more people can live than
lived on the private estate, and if this added population is encouraged
to win more and more interest and profit-bearing forms of wealth, you
have a situation in which the thoroughpaced socialists may be entirely
out of the game.

The essence of the socialist's logic is, that all interest on money and
all profits on goods made for the market (as well as all rent) are
inherently vicious and antisocial so long as they drop into private
pockets. There is no distinction between the greedy _abuses_ of
capitalism through organized privilege and the possible _uses_ of
capitalism under regulation.

But think of this issue as we may, we are as a fact now committed to
regulation--committed to a long and hard struggle to bring monopoly
evils under social control. This is now our situation and our problem.

Yet how easy it is to put these evils into phrases! How hard it is to
relate ourselves to definite and effective proposals for the elimination
of the evils! Such proposals have nevertheless been at last put before
us with coherence and with deliberation. They have been put before the
American people with a clearness which cannot be shirked without bad
faith on our part. They have been brought within the sphere of practical
politics, where their decision now waits upon the choice of the people
as a whole.

This commanding policy for future as well as for present interests, for
the entire people as well as for the few, has been stated in its
integrity in two messages from President Roosevelt. Men may differ about
the Philippines; about