ed
colonies, and administered justice to millions of human beings. In our
own time, we have seen the assumption of many of the functions of these
and similar private companies by the sovereign. We have seen the East
India Company absorbed by the British Parliament; we have seen the
railways, and the telephone and the telegraph companies, taken into
possession, very generally, by the most progressive governments of the
world; and now we have come to the necessity of dealing with the
domestic-trade monopoly, because trade has fallen into monopoly through
the centralization of capital in a constantly contracting circle of
ownership.

Among innumerable kinds of monopolies none have been more troublesome
than trade monopolies, especially those which control the price of the
necessaries of life; for, so far as I know, no people, approximately
free, have long endured such monopolies patiently. Nor could they well
have done so without constraint by overpowering physical force, for the
possession of a monopoly of a necessary of life by an individual, or by
a small privileged class, is tantamount to investing a minority,
contemptible alike in numbers and in physical force, with an arbitrary
and unlimited power to tax the majority, not for public, but for private
purposes. Therefore it has not infrequently happened that persistence in
adhering to and in enforcing such monopolies has led, first, to attempts
at regulation, and, these failing, to confiscation, and sometimes to the
proscription of the owners. An example of such a phenomenon occurs to
me which, just now, seems apposite.

In the earlier Middle Ages, before gunpowder made fortified houses
untenable when attacked by the sovereign, the highways were so dangerous
that trade and manufactures could only survive in walled towns. An
unarmed urban population had to buy its privileges, and to pay for these
a syndicate grew up in each town, which became responsible for the town
ferm, or tax, and, in return, collected what part of the municipal
expenses it could from the poorer inhabitants. These syndicates, called
guilds, as a means of raising money, regulated trade and fixed prices,
and they succeeded in fixing prices because they could prevent
competition within the walls. Presently complaints became rife of guild
oppression, and the courts had to entertain these complaints from the
outset, to keep some semblance of order; but at length the turmoil
passed beyond the reach of t