National licensing of corporations to do business—a remedy proposed by Mr. Bryan and adopted by President Roosevelt—must also be dismissed. Obviously if the state has endowed corporations and armed them with letters of marque by authority of which they may prey upon commerce, it is the height of absurdity to ignore this feature of the question with talk about licensing them. In a very real sense they are already licensed, for it must be repeated that combinations do not create the monopoly, but merely avail themselves of the monopolistic powers created by society through acts of Government. Of necessity all such laws must fail. This, it is scarcely necessary to say, has been the universal experience. And from future legislation no more is to be hoped than from past legislation, however well intentioned. The reason why all this anti-trust legislation is futile is because, having created monopoly privileges, Government has appealed to the natural instincts of all men to seek these opportunities and benefits. Such laws are attempts to give effective form to the public’s foolish anathemas against impulses shared by everybody, and are therefore as futile as the Pope’s bull against the comet. When we understand that these great trusts are monopolies that Government has made, we will realize why it is that Government cannot unmake them by any other process than by removing the causes of their creation.[3] Books prescribing such anti-trust legislation may continue to cumber the libraries of our lawyers, and streams of statutes may continue to pour from the lawmaking bodies of states and Nation, but these will be either positively harmful or wholly harmless, never effective. We are, indeed, “fooling” with natural laws, and we can do so only at our peril. The law of competition and the law of co-operation or combination are what they have often been called, the centripetal and centrifugal forces of social economics. Competition is often a painful but really a merciful process; it weeds out the useless and the inefficient; selects unerringly its business leaders; destroys, but where it destroys builds up; rescues from the mass the individuals and processes most fitted to survive, and out of chaos brings order. It replaces obsolete with more perfect organization, and where such organization becomes unwieldy it replaces organization with individuals, reverting to the earlier type of industry. Thus the country store is succeeded by the store in which is sold but one line of goods, and this is succeeded by the mammoth type of country store, the great city’s department store; and the development of the last named type seems again to revert to the second—viz., a congeries of stores in which each is distinct from the other, each attaining a reputation for competitive excellence in one line of goods, thus illustrating in the retail trade the interplay of the forces of competition and combination.