Before going on I ought to mention that there is another view of the events of 1904. I have heard Mr. Arthur Brisbane maintain that we are to have no more overproduction crises, for the reason that, competition having been abolished in all our principal industries, our trust magnates can so adjust supply to demand as to mitigate the stress, and give instead periods of partial idleness in widely scattered industries. [Illustration: _Diagram prepared by Wilshire’s Magazine_ DIAGRAM SHOWS HOW HIGH PRICES FOLLOW WARS Range of average prices of 25 leading Railway Stocks for the past 22 years ] If this is true, it is very important, for it means a long continuance of Trust government; but I do not believe that it is true. The trusts have, of course, put an end to blind production without any assurance of a market; but even assuming that our industry were so far systematised and our management so conservative that we never manufactured goods except upon a definite order—how would that be able to hold in check a community gone mad with prosperity-drunkenness? For instance, the steel trust now has orders enough ahead for two years; and upon the basis of these orders, its administrators are going ahead building a new “steel city.” Yet does the steel trust know what proportion of its orders for steel rails are intended for the transportation of purely speculative freight? Does it know what proportion of its orders for structural steel is intended for buildings for imaginary tenants? Does it concern itself with the problem whether its customers are going to be able to find any use for the materials which they have bought? There might be more plausibility in the argument, if our trust magnates were men of conscience and a keen sense of responsibility; but as a matter of fact their attitude toward their work is purely predatory. They are not administrators of production at all, but parasites upon production, exploiters and wreckers. Far from striving to regulate the madness of the public, they are competing among themselves to fan it to a flame, so that they may capitalise the expectations of their own properties.[5] Footnote 5: Anyone who wishes to make a scientific study of the true functions of modern finance is advised to read Professor Veblen’s last book, “The Theory of Business Enterprise,” a most extraordinary study of the whole field of present-day economics. In my opinion this book, together with its author’s other masterpiece, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” constitutes the greatest contribution to social science ever made in America, and perhaps the greatest in the world since Carl Marx. It might be worth while to add in passing that Professor Veblen was turned out of Mr. Rockefeller’s University of Chicago for writing it.