Mr. Calvin’s face lighted up.  “That is precisely what I say in my speeches to the farmers.  That’s our whole idea in a nutshell.”

“And yet the Trust produces milk more cheaply than could the independent dairymen?” Ernest queried.

“Why shouldn’t it, with the splendid organization and new machinery its large capital makes possible?”

“There is no discussion,” Ernest answered.  “It certainly should, and, furthermore, it does.”

Mr. Calvin here launched out into a political speech in exposition of his views.  He was warmly followed by a number of the others, and the cry of all was to destroy the trusts.

“Poor simple folk,” Ernest said to me in an undertone.  “They see clearly as far as they see, but they see only to the ends of their noses.”

A little later he got the floor again, and in his characteristic way controlled it for the rest of the evening.

“I have listened carefully to all of you,” he began, “and I see plainly that you play the business game in the orthodox fashion.  Life sums itself up to you in profits.  You have a firm and abiding belief that you were created for the sole purpose of making profits.  Only there is a hitch.  In the midst of your own profit-making along comes the trust and takes your profits away from you.  This is a dilemma that interferes somehow with the aim of creation, and the only way out, as it seems to you, is to destroy that which takes from you your profits.

“I have listened carefully, and there is only one name that will epitomize you.  I shall call you that name.  You are machine-breakers.  Do you know what a machine-breaker is?  Let me tell you.  In the eighteenth century, in England, men and women wove cloth on hand-looms in their own cottages.  It was a slow, clumsy, and costly way of weaving cloth, this cottage system of manufacture.  Along came the steam-engine and labor-saving machinery.  A thousand looms assembled in a large factory, and driven by a central engine wove cloth vastly more cheaply than could the cottage weavers on their hand-looms.  Here in the factory was combination, and before it competition faded away.  The men and women who had worked the hand-looms for themselves now went into the factories and worked the machine-looms, not for themselves, but for the capitalist owners.  Furthermore, little children went to work on the machine-looms, at lower wages, and displaced the men.  This made hard times for the men.  Their standard of living fell.  They starved.  And they said it was all the fault of the machines.  Therefore, they proceeded to break the machines.  They did not succeed, and they were very stupid.

“Yet you have not learned their lesson.  Here are you, a century and a half later, trying to break machines.  By your own confession the trust machines do the work more efficiently and more cheaply than you can.  That is why you cannot compete with them.  And yet you would break those machines.  You are even more stupid than the stupid workmen of England.  And while you maunder about restoring competition, the trusts go on destroying you.