t first sight, more astounding to
a man of modern times than the fact that men engaged in the same
industry, instead of fraternizing as comrades and co-laborers to a
common end, should have regarded each other as rivals and enemies to be
throttled and overthrown. This certainly seems like sheer madness, a
scene from bedlam. But more closely regarded, it is seen to be no such
thing. Your contemporaries, with their mutual throat-cutting, knew very
well what they were at. The producers of the nineteenth century were
not, like ours, working together for the maintenance of the community,
but each solely for his own maintenance at the expense of the
community. If, in working to this end, he at the same time increased
the aggregate wealth, that was merely incidental. It was just as
feasible and as common to increase one's private hoard by practices
injurious to the general welfare. One's worst enemies were necessarily
those of his own trade, for, under your plan of making private profit
the motive of production, a scarcity of the article he produced was
what each particular producer desired. It was for his interest that no
more of it should be produced than he himself could produce. To secure
this consummation as far as circumstances permitted, by killing off and
discouraging those engaged in his line of industry, was his constant
effort. When he had killed off all he could, his policy was to combine
with those he could not kill, and convert their mutual warfare into a
warfare upon the public at large by cornering the market, as I believe
you used to call it, and putting up prices to the highest point people
would stand before going without the goods. The day dream of the
nineteenth century producer was to gain absolute control of the supply
of some necessity of life, so that he might keep the public at the
verge of starvation, and always command famine prices for what he
supplied. This, Mr. West, is what was called in the nineteenth century
a system of production. I will leave it to you if it does not seem, in
some of its aspects, a great deal more like a system for preventing
production. Some time when we have plenty of leisure I am going to ask
you to sit down with me and try to make me comprehend, as I never yet
could, though I have studied the matter a great deal how such shrewd
fellows as your contemporaries appear to have been in many respects
ever came to entrust the business of providing for the community to a
class wh