It is usual to notice, and not unusual to deplore the duplication of plant and appliances in many lines of industry, due to competitive management, as in factories engaged in the same class of manufacture, in parallel or otherwise competing railways and boat lines, in retail merchandising, and in some degree also in the wholesale trade. The result, of course, is sabotage; in the sense that this volume of appliances, materials and workmen are not employed to the best advantage for the community. One effect of the arrangement is an increased necessary cost of the goods and services supplied by these means. The reason for it is competition for gain to be got from the traffic. That all this is an untoward state of things is recognised on all hands; but no lively regret is commonly spent on the matter, since it is commonly recognised that under the circumstances there is no help for it except at the cost of a more untoward remedy. The competitive system having been tried and found good--or at least so it is assumed--it is felt that the system will have to be accepted with the defects of its qualities. Its characteristic qualities are held to be good, acceptable to the tastes of modern men whose habits of thought have been standardised in its terms; and it would be only reluctantly and by tardy concession that these modern men could bring themselves to give up that scheme of "Natural Liberty" within the framework of which runs this competitive system of business management and its wasteful manifolding of half-idle equipment and nugatory work. The common man, at the worst, comforts himself and his neighbour with the sage reflection that "It might have been worse." The businessmen, on the other hand, have also begun to take note of this systematic waste by duplication and consequent incompetence, and have taken counsel how to intercept the waste and divert it to their own profit. The businessmen's remedy is consolidation of competing concerns, and monopoly control. To the common man, with his preconceptions on the head of "restraint of trade," the proposed remedy seems more vicious than the evil it is designed to cure. The fault of the remedy plainly is not that the mismanagement of affairs due to competitive business can not be corrected by recourse to monopoly, but only that the community, it is presumed, would still suffer all the burdens and discomforts of the regime of competition and sabotage, with, possibly, further inconveniences and impositions at the hands of the businesslike monopoly; which, men are agreed, may fairly be depended on to use its advantage unsparingly under the business principle of charging what the traffic will bear.