The example of the Federal office-holders in the great majority in voting and using their influence to protect their individual positions, without regard to the larger interest of the public, is such as to make all patriotic citizens acquainted with the facts wish and desire that their numbers be not increased to any such extent as would be the case in the community ownership of industry and business. The history of American large cities, shows for the most part, that these urban governments are controlled and administered by one set of selfish political leaders after another, whose power is predicated upon party machinery, held together mainly by party patronage, favoritism and public graft. And thus to put industry and business under the administration of the government is to more than multiply the dangers to the public of those industrial and political leaders, who have made representative government in the United States little more than a mere form. Economic Socialism would not only place too large a machine at the disposal of political leaders to be used against the people, but it would stifle initiation and tend too much to hold society in a static condition. Under individual ownership of industry and business, under the laws of legitimate competition, initiation is encouraged by offering increasing rewards to those who adopt new methods and invent new things to advance human welfare by lightening the burdens of life and labor. The spirit of rivalry and competition maintains a constant and steady demand for the best that can be produced for the people in all lines of industry and business, which is among the strongest incentives to new thought and invention. Man is naturally a conservative being and without some stimulant will be content with conditions as they came down to him from the past. It is true that in spite of economic incentives there will appear now and then an individual who is inspired by higher motives for the advancement of the race, but the great masses of the people still require the power and pleasure of possession, individual ownership, and the more material rewards of industry and business. And so it appears to me that Socialism would tend to bring society to a stagnant condition, arrest human progress most seriously, and discourage in the future those human benefactors, who, in the past have blazed the way for the marvelous development and advancement of modern society.