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, at 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