There is the additional ground of public hostility that the weapons employed to crush competitors have often been illegal weapons. Without the assistance of the railway companies (which was given in violation of the law) the Standard Oil Company might have been unable to win more than one of its battles; but this fact, while it furnishes a handle against the company and exposes a side of it which may prove to be vulnerable, and is therefore kept to the front in any public indictment of the company's methods, is an immaterial factor in the popular feeling. Few Americans (or Englishmen) will not accept a reduced rate from a railway company when they can get it. Whatever actual bitterness may be felt by the average man against the Standard Oil Company because it procured rebates on its freight bills is rather the bitterness of jealousy than of an outraged sense of morality. The real bitterness--and very bitter it is--is caused by the fact that the company has crushed out so many individuals. On similar ground nothing approaching the same intensity of feeling could be engendered in the British public. Let us now recur for a moment to the views of the young woman quoted above on the interesting topic of chaperons. We have seen that insistence on the individuality is a conspicuous--perhaps it is the most conspicuous--trait of the American character. Encouraged by the wider horizon and more ample elbow-room and assisted by the something more than tolerant good-will of his business associates, colleagues, or competitors, the individual, once insisted on, has every chance to develop and become prosperous and rich. Everything helps a man in America to strike out for himself, to walk alone, and to dispense with a chaperon. The Englishman is chaperoned at almost every step of his business career; and I am not speaking now of the chaperonage of his colleagues, of his fellows in the community, or of his elders among whom he grows up and, generally, in spite of whom the young man must make his way to the top. There is another much more significant form of chaperonage in English business circles, of which it is difficult to speak without provoking hostility. The English business world is solicitor-cursed. I mean by this no reflection on solicitors either individually or in the mass. I am making no reference to such cases as there have been of misappropriation by solicitors here and there of funds entrusted to their charge, nor to their methods of making charges, which are preposterous but not of their choosing. Let us grant that, given the necessity of solicitors at all, Great Britain is blessed in that she has so capable and upright and in all ways admirable a set of men to fill the offices and do the work. What I am attacking is solicitordom as an institution.