be better taken into account by small producers, each closely watching a small market, than by a large producer who gets but a bird's-eye-view of all. So far as inflation aids speculation, by constantly raising prices, it can be but a secondary cause of hard times, as speculation itself is only such.

Distinction must be made between hard times and poverty times. A nation or the world might gradually grow poor and remain so without industrial shocks and without recuperation. The economist's term for this is poverty times. Inflation might go far to bring this about, but it would not be by a series of industrial depressions. Such assumed radical and constant inflation would prevent industrial revival. Hence constant descent without ascent. Inflation, for its effect in helping to produce intermittent hard times, must be scanned more narrowly.

As intermittent hard times are chiefly caused by economic corpses and monopoly in the present stage of industry is a most prolific breeder of such, monopoly in barbaric commercialism is a great contributor to hard times. It follows that whatever lessens the evil of monopoly in this respect will tend to prevent hard times. The remedy for monopoly so far as it is evil, and only maleficent monopoly is evil, is presented in the next chapter. It consists of only three rules which together con

stitute the code (as to selling) of civilized commercialism.

Perhaps the fortified reader will perceive in it something more than a code-a door of opportunity and an extension of democracy. If so, he will see the latter for the first time entering that field into which, though occupying six-sevenths of the life of most business men, they have never been able to drag their religion. Their difficulty seems to have been that they tried to pass it through the needle's eye of personal gain. The broad, open door of the brotherhood of man offers a wider aperture. Perhaps, after all, in time the fullest democracy will be found to be the most practical Christianity.

CHAPTER IV

BUSINESS IS JUSTICE AND JUSTICE IS

A

BUSINESS

LTHOUGH much law has been aimed at busi

ness, none has yet hit it. So far the law has succeeded in hitting only the agencies and integuments of business and thereby has succeeded only in needlessly clogging the channels of trade. Business needed regulating, not handicapping. Wrong diagnosis induced wrong treatment. Business itself consists only of buying and selling, not of a corporate shell. Business itself is still outside the law. In their buying and selling business men at present inhabit a barbaric land of anarchy all their own. Like the privileged classes of former times and other climes, they have never been brought, as buyers and sellers, beneath the benignant sway of equal law. The trusts have severely handicapped their small competitors and the remedies applied have merely proposed, in retaliation, to handicap the trusts. Law is not war. Legal science makes little progress by the method of that art.

The present evil the trusts inflict is great. But

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the trusts at present inflict this evil, in general, simply by following on a large scale the same system which all are following—or can follow so far as the law is concerned. On the large scale the evil is more perceptible, but not in essence more unjust. When fair rules control all business men, no separate law will be needed for trusts. A scientific remedy will change the system but only to the extent necessary to remove the evil. The new system will not vainly attempt, though that has been the practice of the past, to devise a law to punish large malefactors and let little ones escape who are equally guilty but less successful in effecting damage. It will not remove large corporations merely because they are large, nor will it trouble even those which are monopolies so long as they are beneficent. None, large or small, will be allowed by the new system to be maleficent.

Original as this system will seem to some, it will be but a codification of the best present practices of our best commercialists. No new business customs will be invented by legislation. Barbarous commercial practices, merely, will be excluded. It can be scientifically reached by purging the death from the entire body of present commercial practices. This death consists of the practices of all bad commercialists and all bad practices of good commercialists. The body of this death, from which commercialism has long been crying to be delivered,

is but a body of barbarism lingering in civilization. Only three simple rules, which all business men can understand in advance, will be left to constitute the selling code of the new and civilized commercialism. When they are followed with fair success, the evil now inflicted upon competitors and the public by trusts and monopolies, as sellers, will end.

Selling has been over-long looked at only from the standpoint of the seller. Our law and our business, at present, have here an individualistic, not a social, outlook. The time has come to look at selling from the standpoint of all. All are buyers. It is true that in every sale there is a seller as well as a buyer, but in present-day business the sellers repeat more often. The interest of society as a whole should be placed before the interest of any part. Even sellers are buyers. Under a system of equal justice the equal freedom of all must be preferred to the privilege of some. A present commercial adjustment which is resulting in commercial privilege therefore needs readjustment. A system which is working inequality of opportunity needs to be readjusted until it works equality of opportunity. As only further inequality can be reached by further adjusting our commercial system in the interest of sellers, it is time to adjust it in the interest of buyers.

Equality of opportunity for buyers, rather than sellers, is also to be preferred for the reason that