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.
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