shall include an inquiry as to the means of removing it and restoring industry to its normal condition. We shall find that this can be done--that competition can be liberated, though the liberation can be accomplished only by difficult action on the part of the state. _The comparatively Narrow Field of Present Action by the State._--Economic theory has always recognized the existence and the restraining action of the civil law, which has prohibited many things which the selfishness of individuals would have prompted them to do. Certain officers of the state constitute, as we saw in an early chapter, one generic class of laborers, one of whose functions it is to retain in a state of appropriation things on which other men have conferred utility--that is, to protect property, and so to cooeperate in the creation of wealth. In a few directions they render services which private employers might render in a less effective way. The state, through its special servants, educates children and youth, guards the public health, encourages inventions, stimulates certain kinds of production, collects statistics, carries letters and parcels, provides currency, improves rivers and harbors, preserves forests, constructs reservoirs for irrigation, and digs canals and tunnels for transportation. In these ways and in others it enters the field of positive production; but in the main it leaves that field to be occupied by private employers of labor and capital. Business is still individualistic, since those who initiate enterprises and control them are either natural persons or those artificial and legal persons, the corporations. _The Growing Field of Action by Corporations._--Until recently there has been comparatively little production in the hands of corporations great enough to be exempt from the same economic laws which apply to a blacksmith, a carpenter, or a tailor. Individual enterprise and generally free competition have prevailed. The state has not checked them and the great aggregations of capital to which we give the name "trusts" have not, in this earlier period, been present in force enough to check them. The field for business enterprise has been open to individuals, partnerships, and corporations; they have entered it fearlessly, and a free-for-all competition has resulted. This free action is in process of being repressed by chartered bodies of capitalists, the great corporations, whom the law still treats somewhat as though in its collective entirety each one were an individual. They are building up a semi-public power--a quasi-state within the general state--and besides vitiating the action of economic laws, are perverting governments. They trench on the freedom on which economic laws are postulated and on civic freedom also.