Refining Company, and the combinations in meat packing and in lumber.[175] A safe statement would probably be that the greater part of the surplus gains of the most conspicuous American monopolies have been due to excessive prices rather than to economies of production. Let us turn from the subject of unjust monopoly gains to that of unfair methods used by the great combinations toward their competitors. These methods are mainly three: discriminative underselling, exclusive-selling contracts, and advantages in transportation. _Discriminative Underselling_ The first of these practices is exemplified when a monopoly sells its goods at unprofitably low rates in competitive territory, while maintaining higher prices elsewhere; and when it offers at very low prices those kinds of goods which are handled by competitors, while holding at excessively high prices the kinds of commodities over which it has exclusive control. Both forms of the practice seem to have been extensively used by most of the monopolistic concerns of America.[176] The Standard Oil Company has been perhaps the most conspicuous offender in this field.[177] This practice is unjust because it violates the fundamental moral principle that a man has a right to pursue a lawful good without hindrance through illicit means. Among the illicit means enumerated by the moral theologians are force, fraud, deception, lying, slander, intimidation, and extortion.[178] The illicit means employed in discriminative underselling are chiefly extortion and deception. If the very low prices at which the monopoly sells in the field which contains competitors were maintained outside of that field also, and if they were continued not merely until the independent concerns were driven out of business, but indefinitely afterward, no injustice would be done the latter. For no man has a natural right to any particular business. If a powerful concern can eliminate competitors through low prices made possible by superior efficiency, the competitors are not unjustly treated. They have no more just cause of complaint than the inefficient grocer whose custom is attracted from him by other and more efficient merchants. The offence is at the worst contrary to charity. But when the monopoly maintains the low and competition-eliminating prices only locally and temporarily, when it is enabled to establish and continue these prices only because it sells its goods at extortionate rates elsewhere, the latter prices are evidently the instrument or means by which the competitors are injured and eliminated. In that case the monopoly violates the right of the competitors to pursue a lawful good immune from unfair interference. The lawful good is a livelihood from this kind of business; and the illicit interference is the unjust prices maintained outside the competitive field.