assembled in a large factory,
and driven by a central engine wove cloth vastly more cheaply than
could the cottage weavers on their hand-looms. Here in the factory was
combination, and before it competition faded away. The men and women who
had worked the hand-looms for themselves now went into the factories
and worked the machine-looms, not for themselves, but for the capitalist
owners. Furthermore, little children went to work on the machine-looms,
at lower wages, and displaced the men. This made hard times for the men.
Their standard of living fell. They starved. And they said it was
all the fault of the machines. Therefore, they proceeded to break the
machines. They did not succeed, and they were very stupid.

"Yet you have not learned their lesson. Here are you, a century and a
half later, trying to break machines. By your own confession the trust
machines do the work more efficiently and more cheaply than you can.
That is why you cannot compete with them. And yet you would break those
machines. You are even more stupid than the stupid workmen of England.
And while you maunder about restoring competition, the trusts go on
destroying you.

"One and all you tell the same story,--the passing away of competition
and the coming on of combination. You, Mr. Owen, destroyed competition
here in Berkeley when your branch store drove the three small groceries
out of business. Your combination was more effective. Yet you feel the
pressure of other combinations on you, the trust combinations, and you
cry out. It is because you are not a trust. If you were a grocery trust
for the whole United States, you would be singing another song. And the
song would be, 'Blessed are the trusts.' And yet again, not only is your
small combination not a trust, but you are aware yourself of its lack
of strength. You are beginning to divine your own end. You feel
yourself and your branch stores a pawn in the game. You see the powerful
interests rising and growing more powerful day by day; you feel their
mailed hands descending upon your profits and taking a pinch here and
a pinch there--the railroad trust, the oil trust, the steel trust, the
coal trust; and you know that in the end they will destroy you, take
away from you the last per cent of your little profits.

"You, sir, are a poor gamester. When you squeezed out the three small
groceries here in Berkeley by virtue of your superior combination, you
swelled out your chest, talked about eff