and to exact arbitrary profits from the masses, are the extreme of selfishness and oppression. The universal nature of this truth was perceived when the world emerged from the medieval system of economics, but it seems in danger of being forgotten. This is illustrated by the criticism of Mr. E. P. Alexander, the most recent writer on the railway question, that those who hold competition to be the only just measure of profits in any industry are years behind the age in comprehension of the science of the railway question."

Whatever there may be beyond platitude in the above is pure invention. The element of "the least cost" as parcel of the definition of "commerce " is certainly novel, and as interesting as it is novel. And certainly, too, the remainder of the sentence -from the words "the universal nature of this truth" (which truth ?—Mr. Hudson has alluded to several) onward—is an extremely remarkable statement to come from the pen of a writer who assumes to deal with economical questions and matters of social science. The allusion to Mr. Alexander is equally childish, and without bearing upon the matter which we believe Mr. Hudson claims to be discussing; unless, indeed, he thought it necessary to show, in passing, how thoroughly he had failed to comprehend the question of American railway systems, to the discussion of which Mr. Alexander has lately contributed a most admirable monograph. When Mr. Alexander used the words dragged from their context as above, he was pointing out how the question of modern industrial competition had long since ceased to involve simple problems of competition in getting business alone; how it at present includes also the element of the cost versus the price of doing business at all—that is to say, the value of the opportunity to do business at all, as against the actual outlay in cost necessary to do the business brought to the party offering to do the business at all (which element, everybody-who knows anything of the matter at all-knows to be not only a very serious and a very practical one, but actually the paramount one, under present conditions). (As others besides Mr. Hudson may be ignorant of Mr. Alexander's meaning just

here, I may explain that, to the railway, the value of doing a competing business, of keeping its trains running and so perpetuating its charter, is naturally always a larger consideration than the mere question of a profit-is, in fact, the most vital consideration that could be named. Or, should the question present itself differently: a bankrupt railroad is worse than no railroad at all. It can run recklessly and cheaply, since unable to respond in damages for lives or property injured or destroyed. And yet, were competition the only rule by which 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 competition 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 combination. 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 competition." If this is the very question at issue, it would seem as if Mr. Hudson has so far been artfully misleading us. He certainly 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 business 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 business 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 what 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 competition-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. Hudson 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— (not having any competitors in the ark-building trade he felt safe in allowing himself a reasonable time)—to the patriarchal 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 nations, by purchase and sale, trade, traffic." Very powerful indeed, 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. According to Mr. Hudson, however, these tendencies, laws, and rules do not amount to so very much. It is an easy enough matter to handle

We have only to legislate railway companies out of existence, and then enact statutes forbidding two of the same trade to combine. Then things will run smoothly. The State will hold the trackage of the late railroad companies as a highway; and every dealer, manufacturer, agriculturist, miner, will carry his product to and fro, and-there you are! No more modern feudalism; nothing but peace, plenty, and communism!

Faulconridge would only frighten boys with bugs, but a moral drawn from the middle ages, by reason of its mere remoteness, appears always to be a powerful antic with which to worry the non-capitalist imagination. Any combination of like interests for business purposes-the copartnership formed by three butterdealers or six coal-miners to continue the business of selling butter or mining coal; the corporation, or "trust," or combination formed by amalgamation of any existing companies-is a palpa

ble return to the days of feudalism. Thus, the present system of combinations becomes "modern feudalism." Your combinations are so large that they build up a favored and aristocratic class, like the old crown vassals. And again, these industrial combinations are hand and glove with the railways, and so form a network of capital in the meshes of which the poor man is strangled. Now, the simple facts upon which Mr. Hudson assumes to found this hue and cry are these, viz.: The normal tendency of trade to tradecenters, where it can be most conveniently handled, has its inevitable corollary in the tendency, within the trade center, to centralization of the different branches of trade. In the middle ages the principle operated to build up such imperial centers as Nuremberg, Antwerp, and London, and the corollary to organize, within those centers, the great trade-guilds. In later years the Atlantic Ocean, the Hudson River, and Long Island Sound combined to make New York city an emporium for the deposit and distribution of the products and industries of two continents, while the merely innocent convenience of traders within that city (not any aristocratic or would-be feudal motives on their part) operated to root and group the leather interest into one quarter, cotton goods into another, oils, and provisions, and ironmongery into still others. And if two or more traders in an identical staple, finding themselves neighbors or united in a community of interest, saw fit to bind themselves into a single firm or trading company, it was no matter of conspiracy against the public weal, but the merest consideration of personal convenience and facility. When the railroads came, they found themselves obliged by the very charters which created them-to haul for anybody who chose to employ them, and to do the most extensive hauling for those who had the largest bulk of hauling for them to do. They were not authorized by their acts of incorporation to first demand certificates of good moral character, or affidavits that the would-be customer was not a combination of individuals or stockholders in a trust or a private corporation. And yet, superfluous as this statement is, it is actually out of such familiar truisms as these (it is difficult to treat the simpleness of the situa

tion without tautology) that Mr. Hudson raises figment after figment and chimera after chimera to disturb and alarm the non-producing and manufacturing classes of this already imperiled community! And the purport of these figments and the portent of these chimeras is always that any use of capital in bulk is crime against this people and this republic; and that the incorporation for business purposes "stands in " with some railway company or all railway companies, because incorporations—and especially railway incorporations-hate the bread-winner and the wageworker, and desire that he be crushed and swept from the face of the earth; in other words, are feudal, mediæval, and unpatriotic. That is the whole text and comment of Mr. Hudson's elocution. Even feudalism itself was not a curse. It was a proper and convenient institution for its day and date; considering the popular ignorance and helplessness, anything else would have been a less tolerable tyranny. It was the growth of circumstances, rather than-as Mr. Hudson thinks-the forcing of an arbitrary situation by the strong and aristocratic upon the plebeian and the weak: so, to begin with, granting Mr. Hudson's favored and capitalist class, and granting that they "force" any condition of things upon the non-capitalist class, the analogy of this state of things to the institution of feudalism is false and misleading. But feudalism was more than a situation. It was the only form in which the society of the unlettered and formative civilization could be held together at all-the only one which could, on the one hand, curb the despotism of thrones, while on the other conserving the safety and tranquillity of the people. It was the mother of parliamentary government and of civil liberty, to which -in the fullness of time-it yielded and disappeared.

To give a meaning to Mr. Hudson's vision of an analogy between modern industrial centralization and feudalism, let us assume, however, that he means (he does not say so) the mediaval trade-guilds. Now, these trade-guilds, perhaps, were an accompaniment of certainly they were contemporary with-the institution of feudalism. Moreover, they were broken up and wiped away by the very institution which Mr. Hudson can not find