IS COMBINATION CRIME? 47 



railways were operated among themselves, this very bankrupt 

 road could force every neighboring road to regulate itself by its 

 own tortuous procedure. For, just as a chain is no stronger 

 than its weakest link, so the best railroad in the country can be 

 no better than the worst, if competition and nothing but com- 

 petition is to be the rule.) 



But with all earthly matters Mr. Hudson will have nothing 

 but competition. He will not hear of such a thing as a com- 

 bination. He proceeds : " But the very question at issue is 

 whether they (i. e., these old ideas of competition) are not more 

 in accord with the essential principles of nineteenth-century 

 democracy than those who are turning commerce back to the 

 era of prices fixed by combinations and the suspension of com- 

 petition." If this is the very question at issue, it would seem as 

 if Mr. Hudson has so far been artfully misleading us. He cer- 

 tainly has not alluded to it before. So far as careful perusal of 

 his paper has informed us, the question at issue seemed to be 

 whether a small manufacturer had a right to sell out his busi- 

 ness to a bigger one ; at what point a large manufacturer, who 

 has used his capital in buying out his smaller neighbors, must 

 call a halt, and submit to a redistribution all around ; and as to 

 whether small manufacturers should be compelled to do busi- 

 ness at a loss rather than sell out to larger ones. However, let 

 us patiently shift our ground as often as necessary, if so be we 

 can discover w^hat it is that our Mr. Hudson really does mean. 

 If it is a fact that modern civilization has really introduced new 

 elements — and other principles besides the principle of compe- 

 tition — into commerce, then by all means let us abolish, let us 

 destroy them (Mr. Hudson knows how to destroy a principle), 

 and get back at once — to what ? Not to feudal days, certainly ; 

 for that would be modern feudalism, and that is what Mr. Hud- 

 son will none of. Perhaps we had better, while we are about it, 

 go back to the Deluge, to Noah the navigator, who spent one 

 hundred and twenty years in building a ship whose quarter-deck 

 he was himself to tread — although it does not appear that Noah 

 had any competitors in the ark-building trade — to the patri- 

 archal rather than to the feudal system. 



But, having decided where to go, how are we to turn back 

 commerce ? What is commerce ? Webster says that what we 

 mean by that term is " the interchange or mutual change of 

 goods, wares, productions, or property of any kind between na- 

 tions, by purchase and sale, trade, traffic." Very powerful in- 

 deed, one would imagine, must be the forces or agencies which 

 shall turn back such tendencies as these — the operations of the 

 laws of human necessity which culminate in the rule of supply 

 and demand as working upon the entire human race. Accord- 



