(2) The competitive system means great fluctuations in industry, constant anxiety, forced cut prices, and frequent failures, with their financial ruin and heartbreak to employers and loss of work to employees.  Monopoly means stability, comparative freedom from anxiety, and a saving of the economic confusion and loss of bankruptcies.

(3) The great scale of monopolistic production tends to still further economies.  Raw ported in larger quantities, and so at lower cost; less need be kept on hand at a given time.  The utilization of by-products, made feasible by large-scale production, has proved, in many cases, a striking addition to human wealth.

(4) Monopolistic production means that more money can be put into improved processes, into plant and machinery, into making factories sanitary, and working conditions pleasant.  The conspicuousness of the plant makes it more open to public criticism and more likely to awaken a sense of pride in the owners.  Conditions are seldom tolerated in the big concerns that go unheeded in the little shops.

Surely our attempt, then, must be to retain “big business,” and cure its evils, rather than to turn the hands of the clock backward by reverting to the wasteful competitive system.  If this proves possible, we should work for the organizing of the as yet unorganized industries.  Half of human effort is still wasted, through lack of such organization.  If the innumerable butcher shops, grocery stores, apothecary shops, dry goods stores, etc, throughout the country, were consolidated locally, and then for some considerable section of the country, we could have greatly reduced prices and greatly improved shops.  Mr. Woolworth’s chain of five- and ten-cent stores offers a familiar contemporary example of the efficiency and saving to the consumer of such consolidation.

What are the ethics of the following schemes: 

I. Trade unions and strikes?  We must, then, consider what methods of regulating, without destroying, monopoly are efficient and morally defensible; and, first, the method into which the working classes have put most of their effort and enthusiasm.  The labor-unions have, as a matter of fact, actually effected certain results, which we may rapidly review:-

(1) Their chief accomplishment, and indeed effort, has been the raising of wages and shortening of hours for labor.  Their success, however, has fallen far short of their hopes; and it is impossible to say how much more they have accomplished in this direction than would have been effected by other causes without their efforts.  As a whole, the employing class disbelieves in the unions and is strenuously disinclined to yield to their desires.  And at present the employers are usually stronger than their employees, unless public opinion or legislation forces them to surrender their position.

(2) To some slight extent, but only to a slight extent, they have effected amelioration in other matters have freed labor from the tyranny of company stores, decreased child labor, secured the installation of safety appliances, sanitary conditions, and other needed improvements.