“That is precisely what I object to in your theory. I don’t _want_ that devil released. Competition is the Afreet that the forces of civilization have bottled up after a desperate struggle, and he is always making fine promises of what he will do for you if you will let him out. The fact is he will do nothing but mischief, because that is his nature. He is Beelzebub, he is Satan; in the Miltonic fable he attempted to compete with the Almighty for the rule of heaven; and the fallen angels have been taking the consequence ever since. Monopoly is the only prosperity. Where competition is there can be finally nothing but disaster and defeat for one side or another. That is self-evident. Nothing succeeds till it begins to be a monopoly. This holds good from the lowest to the highest endeavor--from the commercial to the æsthetic, from the huckster to the artist. As long, for instance, as an author is young and poor”--Ray felt, looking down, that the speaker’s eye turned on him--“he must compete, and his work must be deformed by the struggle; when it becomes known that he alone can do his kind of work, he monopolizes and prospers in the full measure of his powers; and he realizes his ideal unrestrictedly. Competition enslaves, monopoly liberates. We must, therefore, have the greatest possible monopoly; one that includes the whole people economically as they are now included politically. Try to think of competition in the political administration as we now have it in the industrial. It isn’t thinkable! Or, yes! They do have it in those Eastern countries where the taxes are farmed to the highest bidder, and the taxpayer’s life is ground out of him.” “I think,” said the school-masterly-looking man, “we all feel this instinctively. The trusts and the syndicates are doing our work for us as rapidly as we could ask.” A voice, with a German heaviness of accent, came from one of the foreigners. “But they are not doing it for our sake, and they mean to stop distinctly short of the whole-people trust. As far back as Louis Napoleon’s rise we were expecting the growth of the corporate industries to accomplish our purposes for us. But between the corporation and the collectivity there is a gulf--a chasm that has never yet been passed.” “We must bridge it!” cried Hughes. A young man, with a clean-cut, English intonation, asked, “Why not fill it up with capitalists?” “No,” said Hughes, “our cause should recognize no class as enemies.” “I don’t think it matters much to them whether we recognize them or not, if we let them have their own w’y,” said the young man, whose cockney origin betrayed itself in an occasional vowel and aspirate. “We shall not let them have their own way unless it is the way of the majority, too,” Hughes returned. “From my point of view they are simply and purely a part of the movement, as entirely so as the proletariat.” “The difficulty will be to get them to take your point of view,” the young man suggested.