The changing world, and lectures to theosophical students.: Fifteen lectures delivered in London during May, June, and July, 1909Besant, Annie
Religion
The changing world, and lectures to theosophical students.: Fifteen lectures delivered in London during May, June, and July, 1909
Besant, Annie
Theosophy; Theosophy -- Study and teaching
Other forms of this robbery are what are called “trusts” and “corners.”
They have been trying, I see, to make a corner in wheat, and another
speculator has been able to checkmate the original speculator by pouring
in millions of bushels of wheat. But people are not fed any better
whichever speculator wins; it is only a problem as to which of the two
should be able to make the largest profits; and then the trusts are built
up, whereby a few men are able to make enormous fortunes and kill out all
the smaller men. Now our American brethren are getting a little tired of
that, and they are trying to find out some way in which they can prevent
it—some Act of Congress, some law which should prevent the trust. But
what law can you possibly pass to prevent the trust, which is only the
natural outcome of competition gone mad? What can you do to prevent that
without crippling also every one of your industrial concerns which are
based on the same principle of cut-throat competition? There is where
the deadlock comes in again. The whole thing is built up on one man
fighting against another, one man trying to overreach another, one man
trying to make better bargains for himself, no matter what happens to his
neighbour—that is the whole method of what we call our commercial system.
If that be so, how are you going to interfere with its natural outcome,
with the inevitable result which grows out of it?—the same principle,
only carried a little to excess, and so shocking the conscience that
was not shocked when people were ruined piecemeal, but is shocked when
they are ruined by hundreds and by thousands; yet each one of those who
were ruined piecemeal suffered as much, his lot was as unfortunate. How,
then, can you cripple the excess without undermining the whole? There is
another of the problems which are set, and yet in the very midst of it
there is a gleam of a brighter future, for in that great alchemy with
which the mighty Chemist of the world’s laboratory changes the forces
that destroy into forces that construct, there are signs that these
trusts which have grown out of the greed and selfishness of men will
really be organisations of industry which will be useful to the community
in the future, when Brotherhood has replaced competition, and when
thought for others takes the place of only thinking for oneself. And so
we see possibilities even in the midst of the troubles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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