How comes it that a power in its unimpeded operations beneficent—namely, the force or forces of combination or co-operation—becomes under certain conditions so injurious to modern industry? Why is a union of two factories or many factories, of two companies or many companies, a signal to the community of anticipated extortion? And why should the development of natural laws—those of combination and co-operation—provoke a public demand for regulation, and those who avail themselves of these operations be deemed amenable to punishment? We may grant that a perfected combination which should succeed in forestalling any given commodity would be criminal. The law from its very beginnings has so regarded all such attempts. It is conceivable that, under certain conditions, a mere agreement between individuals might perfect a combination clearly within the provision of the law compelling its forcible dissolution. But this is not conceivable under modern conditions where wide distribution of capital and free labor exists. Law, indeed, may create such monopolies, which it may by popular demand be called upon to destroy, undoing with one hand what it has done with the other. State-created monopolies have existed often in history—as notably in the reign of Queen Elizabeth—but because these have been created by direct act they have been exceedingly unpopular. So, in periods of greater public intelligence, and where the people exercise larger powers of government, it became necessary to accomplish the same result by indirect means, by putting into operation some general law under which monopoly could find a shelter, and the secret sources of which could not be so easily traced. For, contrary to the almost universal opinion, monopoly is weak. It demands protection. And from what does it demand protection? From the all-powerful natural law of competition. The curious Socialist notion that competition leads to monopoly is true only in the sense that monopoly, seeing how powerless it is when threatened by the forces of competition, seeks the protection of such laws as it can secure, or which already exist, for the suppression of competition. And this brings us to the conclusion which is unavoidable that there are no monopolies save law-created monopolies.[1]