business.  Taxation should be made to bear heavily upon them.  Competitive services should be established wherever this could be done without any excessive loss.  They should be annoyed and worried in every legal way; and all those burdens should be imposed upon them with the explicit understanding that they were measures of war.  In adopting such a policy a community would be fighting for an essential condition of future economic integrity and well-being, and it need not be any more scrupulous about the means employed (always “under the law”) than would an animal in his endeavor to kill some blood-sucking parasite.  The corporation should plainly be told that the fight would be abandoned wherever it was ready to surrender its unlimited franchises for a limited but exclusive monopoly, which in these cases should in all fairness run for a longer term than would be ordinarily permissible.

I have lingered over the case of corporations enjoying municipal franchises, because they offer the only existing illustration of a specific economic situation—­a situation in which a monopolized service is based upon exclusive and permanent economic advantages.  Precisely the same situation does not exist in any other part of the economic area; but the idea is that under a policy of properly regulated recognition such a situation may come to exist in respect to those corporations which should be subject to the jurisdiction of the central government; and just in so far as it does come to exist, the policy of the central government should resemble the one suggested for the municipal governments and already occasionally adopted by them.  That any corporations properly subject to the jurisdiction of the Federal government will attain to the condition of being a “natural” monopoly may be disputed; but according to the present outlook, if such is not the case, the only reason will be that the government by means of official and officious interference “regulates” them into inefficiency, and consequent inability to hold their own against smaller and less “regulated” competitors.  If these corporations are left in the enjoyment of the natural advantages which wisely or unwisely they have been allowed to appropriate, some of them at any rate will gradually attain to the economic standing of “natural” monopolies.

The railroad system of the country is gradually approximating to such a condition.  The process of combination which has been characteristic of American railroad development from the start has been checked recently both by government action and by anti-railroad agitation; but if the railroads were exempted from the provisions of the Anti-Trust Law and were permitted, subject to official approval, either to make agreements or to merge, according as they were competing or non-competing lines, there can be no doubt that the whole country would be gradually divided up among certain large and essentially non-competitive systems.  A measure of competition would always remain, even if one corporation