Special advantages of this sort necessarily involve injustice to the competitors of the monopoly. If the low rates given to the monopolistic concern are a sufficiently high price for the service of carrying freight, the higher charges imposed upon the competing concerns are extortionate; if the former rates are unprofitably low, the difference between sufficient and insufficient freight charges is made up by the independent concerns. In the former case the independents pay the railroad too much; in the latter case they bear burdens that should properly rest upon the monopoly. The monopolistic concern is partly responsible for this injustice inasmuch as it urges and often intimidates the railroad to establish the discriminating rates. All three of the practices that we have been considering are universally condemned by public sentiment. They are all likewise under the ban of statutory law. The first two have recently received detailed and explicit prohibition in the Clayton Anti-Trust Act. _Natural Monopolies_ Up to this point we have been dealing with private and artificial monopolies. We turn now to consider briefly those natural and quasi-public monopolies which are either tacitly or explicitly recognised as monopolies by public authority, and whose charges are to a greater or less extent regulated by some department of the State. Such are, for example; steam railroads and municipal utilities. When the charges made for the services of these corporations are _adequately_ regulated by public authority, the owners of such concerns will have a right to all the surplus gains that they can obtain. In that case a contract is made between the corporation and the public which is presumably fair to both parties, and which represents the social estimate of what is just. If the public authorities have not sufficiently safeguarded the interests of the people, if they have permitted the charges to be so high as to provide excessive returns for the corporation, the latter is under no moral obligation to refrain from reaping the full benefit of the State's negligence or incompetence. If, however, the unduly high rates have been brought about through bribery, extortion, or deception practised by the corporation, the inequitable contract thus arranged will not justify the surplus gains thus produced. For example; if the corporation deliberately and effectively conceals the real value of its property through stockwatering, and thus misleads the public authority into permitting charges which return twelve instead of six per cent. on the actual investment, the corporation cannot forthwith justly claim the surplus gain represented by the extra six per cent.