Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/61

Rh of Ms trade and as a member of his guild) with the modern "knight of labor" who will not that any should toil for bread who has not first paid a tax to his "lodge" or "headquarters" or camp—is to insult the guild of the middle ages and its master. But, for all that, the guild and the trades-union are nearer in theory and in practice than the guild and the modern business corporation as chartered in any known quarter of the civilized world to-day. One thing, however, there was in those middle ages, of which, happily for Mr. Hudson and his kind, no analogy has survived—namely, statutes against heresy and seditious utterances, and capital punishments, such as disemboweling, the axe, fagot, etc., for the stirrer-up of discord and unreasonable public discontent. So much for feudalism and the guilds.

Mr. Hudson's next sentence is a long one, and it reads heroically: "It is the almost universal plea, in mitigation for this infraction of economic law, that the capital engaged in combination can not earn fair profits if competition is allowed free play. But what constitutes the just measure of reward for capital? What are the fair profits for capital seeking investment in bonds, mortgages, or loans on commercial paper? The rate of interest that is fixed by free competition. What is the just measure of returns on capital invested in houses, stores, farms, small manufactures, or a thousand other forms of ordinary enterprise? Free competition. What, indeed, is the force which fixes the rate of wages, despite efforts of labor organizations to oppose combination to the action of that force, and notwithstanding the violence provoked where these organizations are brought into conflict with the great combinations of capital? The competition of labor for wages. But the result of combination is to establish, for a favored class of capital, by means of the control of the highways of commerce, an exemption from the force which fixes the just reward of all other human effort, so that excessive profits can be exacted from the masses, to be counted by the tens of millions annually; and if the ideal of railway pooling could be attained, this policy would impose upon the nation a burden of fictitious capital three times the amount of the national debt!"

The term "free competition" in the above, as we have shown, means "forced competition" (at least it means that if the remainder of Mr. Hudson's paper means anything). A and B must compete, whether they will or no: the moment they combine and become A & B, or A, B & Co., or The A and B Manufacturing Company, they are a public calamity and a standing threat to our free institutions! The reader will notice also that labor organizations are law-abiding, peaceful, and highly creditable organizations, unless unhappily "brought into conflict with the