, the waste by mistaken undertakings;
second, the waste from the competition and mutual hostility of those
engaged in industry; third, the waste by periodical gluts and crises,
with the consequent interruptions of industry; fourth, the waste from
idle capital and labor, at all times. Any one of these four great
leaks, were all the others stopped, would suffice to make the
difference between wealth and poverty on the part of a nation.

"Take the waste by mistaken undertakings, to begin with. In your day
the production and distribution of commodities being without concert or
organization, there was no means of knowing just what demand there was
for any class of products, or what was the rate of supply. Therefore,
any enterprise by a private capitalist was always a doubtful
experiment. The projector having no general view of the field of
industry and consumption, such as our government has, could never be
sure either what the people wanted, or what arrangements other
capitalists were making to supply them. In view of this, we are not
surprised to learn that the chances were considered several to one in
favor of the failure of any given business enterprise, and that it was
common for persons who at last succeeded in making a hit to have failed
repeatedly. If a shoemaker, for every pair of shoes he succeeded in
completing, spoiled the leather of four or five pair, besides losing
the time spent on them, he would stand about the same chance of getting
rich as your contemporaries did with their system of private
enterprise, and its average of four or five failures to one success.

"The next of the great wastes was that from competition. The field of
industry was a battlefield as wide as the world, in which the workers
wasted, in assailing one another, energies which, if expended in
concerted effort, as to-day, would have enriched all. As for mercy or
quarter in this warfare, there was absolutely no suggestion of it. To
deliberately enter a field of business and destroy the enterprises of
those who had occupied it previously, in order to plant one's own
enterprise on their ruins, was an achievement which never failed to
command popular admiration. Nor is there any stretch of fancy in
comparing this sort of struggle with actual warfare, so far as concerns
the mental agony and physical suffering which attended the struggle,
and the misery which overwhelmed the defeated and those dependent on
them. Now nothing about your age is, a