There were flushed and angry faces at the table, and withal a measure of awe.  They were a little frightened at this smooth-faced young fellow, and the swing and smash of his words, and his dreadful trait of calling a spade a spade.  Mr. Calvin promptly replied.

“And why not?” he demanded.  “Why can we not return to ways of our fathers when this republic was founded?  You have spoken much truth, Mr. Everhard, unpalatable though it has been.  But here amongst ourselves let us speak out.  Let us throw off all disguise and accept the truth as Mr. Everhard has flatly stated it.  It is true that we smaller capitalists are after profits, and that the trusts are taking our profits away from us.  It is true that we want to destroy the trusts in order that our profits may remain to us.  And why can we not do it?  Why not?  I say, why not?”

“Ah, now we come to the gist of the matter,” Ernest said with a pleased expression.  “I’ll try to tell you why not, though the telling will be rather hard.  You see, you fellows have studied business, in a small way, but you have not studied social evolution at all.  You are in the midst of a transition stage now in economic evolution, but you do not understand it, and that’s what causes all the confusion.  Why cannot you return?  Because you can’t.  You can no more make water run up hill than can you cause the tide of economic evolution to flow back in its channel along the way it came.  Joshua made the sun stand still upon Gibeon, but you would outdo Joshua.  You would make the sun go backward in the sky.  You would have time retrace its steps from noon to morning.

“In the face of labor-saving machinery, of organized production, of the increased efficiency of combination, you would set the economic sun back a whole generation or so to the time when there were no great capitalists, no great machinery, no railroads—­a time when a host of little capitalists warred with each other in economic anarchy, and when production was primitive, wasteful, unorganized, and costly.  Believe me, Joshua’s task was easier, and he had Jehovah to help him.  But God has forsaken you small capitalists.  The sun of the small capitalists is setting.  It will never rise again.  Nor is it in your power even to make it stand still.  You are perishing, and you are doomed to perish utterly from the face of society.

“This is the fiat of evolution.  It is the word of God.  Combination is stronger than competition.  Primitive man was a puny creature hiding in the crevices of the rocks.  He combined and made war upon his carnivorous enemies.  They were competitive beasts.  Primitive man was a combinative beast, and because of it he rose to primacy over all the animals.  And man has been achieving greater and greater combinations ever since.  It is combination versus competition, a thousand centuries long struggle, in which competition has always been worsted.  Whoso enlists on the side of competition perishes.”