When the German government secures a large mining property with the distinct understanding that, if necessary, it shall be worked in the public interest to break a private coal monopoly, we have an illustration of one step which our own government ought also to take. The object, in this case, is not to go into a new business, but to break monopoly power, actual or threatened. Or consider that brave experiment station, New Zealand! Her Compulsory Arbitration may fail; she may be forced to an industrial pace slower than we like; but the main purpose of her social policy is sound to the core; and we are now trying clumsily to imitate it. Yet we are still afraid--we "don't more'n half believe it." Her purpose is to use the power of city and state in New Zealand to prevent the private fleecing of the people through monopoly. Whether it is her land policy or her insurance policy, the aim is to check at their source inherent monopoly abuses. One is forever hearing that New Zealand is being given over hand and foot to Socialism. The only trouble with the statement is that it is not true. If you tax a vast estate down there so that it must be cut into small holdings upon which some twenty times more people can live than lived on the private estate, and if this added population is encouraged to win more and more interest and profit-bearing forms of wealth, you have a situation in which the thoroughpaced socialists may be entirely out of the game. The essence of the socialist's logic is, that all interest on money and all profits on goods made for the market (as well as all rent) are inherently vicious and antisocial so long as they drop into private pockets. There is no distinction between the greedy _abuses_ of capitalism through organized privilege and the possible _uses_ of capitalism under regulation. But think of this issue as we may, we are as a fact now committed to regulation--committed to a long and hard struggle to bring monopoly evils under social control. This is now our situation and our problem. Yet how easy it is to put these evils into phrases! How hard it is to relate ourselves to definite and effective proposals for the elimination of the evils! Such proposals have nevertheless been at last put before us with coherence and with deliberation. They have been put before the American people with a clearness which cannot be shirked without bad faith on our part. They have been brought within the sphere of practical politics, where their decision now waits upon the choice of the people as a whole.