Competition; Monopolies -- United States; Trusts, Industrial
Even the evil of intemperance can be traced back to a connection with
monopoly. Who shall blame the tired laborer, if after a week with sixty
hours of unremitting toil, he takes refuge from the dreariness and
lassitude of physical exhaustion, the hopelessness of ambition-quenched
life, and perhaps the discomforts and disquiet of the place he calls
home, in a long draught of that which does, for the time, create in him
an image of exhilaration, strength, self-respect, and manhood? It is but
an image, indeed, and to all but the victim it is a caricature; but when
a man cannot hope for the reality, to only imagine for a brief hour that
he is indeed a king of men, and that care and woe and degradation are no
longer his lot, is a refuge not to be despised.
There is indeed a class of philanthropists who say, with some truth,
that the laboring classes as a whole have now more than they will spend
for their own good, and declare that higher wages means merely more
spent on sprees and debasing sports, of different sorts but universally
harmful. On the other side, the wise philanthropists who are trying to
help their fellow-men in that best of all ways, by teaching them to rely
on themselves, testify that their efforts to make men independent are
largely hampered because it is so extremely difficult for a workingman
to live in any other way than from hand to mouth, especially in our
large cities. The true solution seems to be that all these reforms must
go hand in hand. We must teach men how to make nobler uses of their
incomes and themselves, while we endeavor to bring about reforms that
shall give them greater comforts and more leisure to use for either
self-improvement or self-debasement.
Much more might be said of the indirect effects which result from the
taxation which monopolies inflict upon the community for their own
profit; but they are now so generally realized and understood that we
can devote our time more profitably to the investigation of other evils.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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