Do not fail to mark the word “compelled.” If we cannot sell them, we cannot make profits; and if we cannot make profits, we cannot pay dividends. “I am a great clamourer for dividends,” said Mr. Rockefeller; and other captains of industry share in his weakness. And when a few years ago they found that foreign markets were beginning to fail, they set to work to remedy the evil in the only other possible way—by combining, and limiting the product, and raising prices. And that brings us to the other great symptom of the approach of the breakdown—the organising of the trusts. For six or eight years the process has been going on, irresistibly, automatically—while the country raged and stormed, and poured out its wrath upon the greedy capitalist. And yet the capitalist was no more to blame than a steam-engine that turns aside when it comes to a switch. The capitalist was making profits; and he saw, by the cessation of his profits, that the industrial machine of the country was getting too big for the country’s use. Unless he, and the machine also, were to go to smash, competition in that particular industry must be ended. The work is done now; we have only to sit by and wait until the people get through trying to undo it. I never realise more keenly the naïve and touching incompetence of our so-called intellectual classes, than when I reflect that while our men of action have been accomplishing this mighty work—one of the greatest labours ever wrought for civilisation—our benevolent editors and college presidents have gone right on with their prattling of “freedom of contract” and “_laissez faire_.” And actually, civilisation must sit by and wait ten years, until our people have got through butting their heads against the granite wall of this accomplished fact! But we Socialists have to take the world as we find it, and cultivate a cheerful disposition; and so behold our great national spectacle, the morality-play of the terrible hundred-headed monster of Competition! The terrible monster has killed and destroyed himself, according to the nature of him; but now by Congressional statute and Supreme Court decree he has been patched together again, and will be compelled to go on fighting! Or at least he shall be stuffed and mounted, and shall look as if he were fighting! He shall have wires attached to his joints and electric lights to gleam from his eyes; he shall be taken out in the gorgeous Presidential campaign chariot, drawn by the Grand Old Party elephant, and all the people shall see him, and marvel at his ferocity, and at the deadly conflict he wages among his various heads! Come now, O people!—come editors and statesmen and judges and bishops—come and see how the terrible hundred-headed monster rends and tears himself, and shout for four years more of the “full dinner-pail.”