Here is the real antagonism between monopoly and good citizenship. Anthracite coal is not a business apart--it is a railroad business; and if there are abuses, they cannot be corrected apart from railroad regulation. There is nothing that we now need to know so thoroughly as that the railroad is the one key to the control of all monopolies, including those that often last just long enough to gut the properties according to get-rich-quick principles. The waste of the public wealth under this concentrated stimulus is the darkest economic fact, as the ugliest political fact is the corruption of officials and legislators. Think of a product so vital to the future as the forests; and then picture, if you can, the waste and despoiling of this strictly common wealth that has gone on, and still goes on, in connection with unregulated railroad affiliations,--properties, larger than several Eastern states, stolen, and then burned, and skinned, and devastated, so that two generations cannot repair the loss! And now by highest federal authority we are warned that our timber supply cannot last twenty-five years without a new controlling policy. Yet it is not, of course, the monopoly that is the evil. It is solely the way in which we have allowed the monopolies to be owned and controlled. We have admitted a kind of irresponsible proprietorship that has so debased political methods in the United States that we are made at the present moment (in this one respect) a warning to the world. Last year a social investigator returned from New Zealand. He said: "I found their able men chiefly anxious to avoid the example of the United States. Their problem is to develop a rich and prosperous industrial life, but escape the rottenness of American politics. Whether they succeed or fail, their purpose is great." Their plan is to use the strength of the government to prevent the formation of private monopolies such as have debauched our politics until we have become a mockery among the nations. How long we ourselves have talked of political corruption as if it were separable from the privileged monopolies in business! That we now see this sorry partnership as it is, and are daily more and more aroused by it, and bent on its dissolution, is the surest sign of progress, as it is the surest sign that democracy need not fail. Again and again we wonder how long it will require for the sovereign people to learn a lesson so simple. How many more facts or revelations do we need? The other day a liberal theologian told me that he had been preaching some elemental truths about a larger religious life. A sturdy old listener, who knew they were truths, but didn't quite like to adjust himself, said to the preacher: "I guess that's all true that you've been preaching; but--I don't more'n half believe it."