The Newcastle coal trade grew into something very like a modern American trust with the additional advantage of an authorized government monopoly so long as the agreed-upon duty was paid.  Then there was the Starch Monopoly, a very profitable one because starch was a new delight which soon enabled Elizabethan fops to wear ruffed collars big enough to make their heads—­as one irreverent satirist exclaimed—­’look like John Baptist’s on a platter.’

But America?  Could not America defeat the machinations of all monopolies and other trusts?  Wasn’t America the land of actual gold and silver where there was plenty of room for everyone?  There soon grew up a wild belief that you could tap America for precious metals almost as its Indians tapped maple trees for sugar.  The ‘Mountains of Bright Stones’ were surely there.  Peru and Mexico were nothing to these.  Only find them, and ‘get-rich-quick’ would be the order of the day for every true adventurer.  These mountains moved about in men’s imaginations and on prospectors’ maps, always ahead of the latest pioneer, somewhere behind the Back of Beyond.  They and their glamour died hard.  Even that staid geographer of a later day, Thos.  Jeffreys, added to his standard atlas of America, in 1760, this item of information on the Far Northwest:  Hereabouts are supposed to be the Mountains of Bright Stones mentioned in the Map of ye Indian Ochagach.

Speculation of the wildcat kind was bad.  But it was the seamy side of a praiseworthy spirit of enterprise.  Monopoly seems worse than speculation.  And so, in many ways, it was.  But we must judge it by the custom of its age.  It was often unjust and generally obstructive.  But it did what neither the national government nor joint-stock companies had yet learnt to do.  Monopoly went by court favor, and its rights were often scandalously let and sometimes sublet as well.  But, on the whole, the Queen, the court, and the country really meant business, and monopolists had either to deliver the goods or get out.  Monopolists sold dispensations from unworkable laws, which was sometimes a good thing and sometimes a bad.  They sold licenses for indulgence in forbidden pleasures, not often harmless.  They thought out and collected all kinds of indirect taxation and had to face all the troubles that confront the framers of a tariff policy to-day.  Most of all, however, in a rough-and-ready way they set a sort of Civil Service going.  They served as Boards of Trade, Departments of the Interior, Customs, Inland Revenue, and so forth.  What Crown and Parliament either could not or would not do was farmed out to monopolists.  Like speculation the system worked both ways, and frequently for evil.  But, like the British constitution, though on a lower plane, it worked.