place of the Sherman law, which is purely destructive in its intent.

But, judging from the debates in Congress and its committees, this new legislation is not being considered in the spirit it should be. Many of the bills offered are directed against coöperation. There is still a belated cry for a more drastic "anti-trust" remedy, for a law that will purge the country of all combinations-all combinations except combinations of farmers and combinations of labor-no statesman proposes to frame a law that will interfere with them.

But while many of our law-makers refuse to see conditions as they are, that is by no means true of all, and certain it is that as time goes by the conviction gains ground in Washington that the country is passing slowly but surely from the old competitive basis to the coöperative, and what is needed are not futile laws directed against coöperation, but more legislation in aid of the new spirit that is abroad in the land, legislation that will help men to come together and work together, securing for the public the maximum of good from coöperation, and, at the same time, protecting the people and all classes from abuse of power by combinations.

Many additional illustrations of unfair, oppressive, and disastrous competition are given in the following chapters, but no reader need go beyond his own experience and observation for facts.

The farmer knows that competition means lower prices for his produce, and so all over this country farmers are organizing coöperative societies,1 to enable them to sell what

In addition to the many farmers' coöperative associations enumerated in Chapter XIX, the following just at hand is in point: "Kentucky farmers are preparing to organize a farmers' union covering the entire state, and to establish a central store in every county seat. To date this union has been organized in only a few counties. Wherever the coöperated stores have been established they have given satisfaction.

they have to sell for more money, to get larger and surer

returns.

The laborer knows that competition means lower wages, therefore he joins a union to suppress competition and advance wages.

The merchant and manufacturer know that competition means "cut-throat" prices for what they have to sell, hence they, too, try to form coöperative organizations to lessen competition; but the law is not so indulgent to them, it tries to prevent their doing what farmers and laborers do.

The only class in the community that profits from unre stricted competition is the class that has nothing to sell, people who live on fixed incomes; their interest is in low prices. If they can buy what they want below cost they are happy, even though their advantage means ruination to the farmer, the laborer, the dealer, the manufacturer. But this class is small in numbers and importance as compared with the rest of the community, and not a few would have difficulty in justifying their right to be non-producers in any fair theory of social organization.

"Solicitors for members are constantly at work, and by the time the tobacco, wheat, and corn crops are ready for harvest, many more counties, it is expected, will take up the plan.

"A meeting held in Lexington was attended by leading farmers of different parts of the state. Many of these were members of the old American Society of Equity, established several years ago to force higher prices for tobacco and other farm products from trusts, which then controlled these products.

"From the agitation started by the American Society of Equity came the Burley Tobacco Society, which now controls the production of more than 200,000,000 pounds of tobacco annually in Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and West Virginia."

Another instance from Illinois:

"Farmers of Cumberland and Cole counties signed an agreement to-day pledging themselves not to raise broom-corn for five years unless the dealers will guarantee them a price to exceed $120 a ton in advance of planting. For twenty years the two counties have been the broomcorn center of the country."

President Taft recently advised consumers to form cooperative societies, after the English type, to eliminate the profits of exchange by buying direct from producers. And Colonel Roosevelt, speaking to Minnesota farmers, has advised them to form coöperative societies to eliminate the intermediate dealers and sell direct to the consumers.

CHAPTER IV

GROWTH OF COÖPERATION

I

Every railroad, every telegraph, every telephone, means coöperation, and coöperation means combination in one form or another.

Before the railroad merchants in towns fifty miles apart did not compete with one another; each could charge practically what he pleased; prices could vary fifty or a hundred per cent. without affecting trade appreciably.

A low man might draw trade from territory within, say, twenty or even fifteen miles of the other town, depending upon condition of the roads, season of the year, etc., but the high man in the second town would have customers the other could not reach, customers who could not afford to go the extra distance to make the saving in price.

A railroad between the towns changes their economic relations; now a very slight difference in prices draws trade one way or the other.

Theoretically, and, in large measure, practically, the measure of the opportunity of the merchant in one town to charge more than a merchant in another for like goods, is measured by the fare to and fro between the towns, plus the element of loss of time.

When an electric line is built, running cars every half hour and carrying passengers at nominal rates, the two

towns, so far as prices and competition are concerned, virtually coalesce.

As a matter of fact, smaller towns within twenty-five or fifty miles of large cities are placed in positions of great disadvantage by the rapid spread of electric car lines; they are made suburbs, and trade is seriously affected.

Cities attract trade with a force far beyond the economic advantages offered. Men and, especially, women like to do their shopping in the larger places, even though they lose car fare and time by doing so, and pay as much as their local merchants ask for the same goods.1

Railroads were slow in building compared with the phenomenally rapid spread of electric lines incident to the development of the trolley. The latter are so easily and inexpensively constructed they have spread everywhere within a few years; they and the telephone, with rural postal delivery, have brought the farmer into the city, until it is now as easy for the farmer's wife to do her shopping and marketing as it was for the townsman's wife a generation ago.

The parcel post will still further annihilate distance; it will place the department store and the big mail order house five hundred or a thousand miles away on a footing of equality with both the country and the city merchant; it will intensify competition by bringing in new and powerful factors.

The country merchant sees this, he reads the handwriting on the wall, and he joins hands with the express companies in opposing the parcel post. He is willing it should be tried on rural deliveries because that means he will be able to get his parcels delivered to his customers at a nominal cost while the city house will be excluded.

"Not long ago the merchants of a Wisconsin city made vigorous protests against the low passenger charges to Chicago, in order to keep the people in the city from going to Chicago to purchase supplies."— Prof. R. T. Ely, "Evolution of Industrial Society," pp. 249-250.

But the parcel post is at hand and it will affect local trade very much as the railroads affected it years ago, very much as the trolleys have affected it in times more recentin short, precisely as every cheapening of transportation is bound to affect trade, by widening the competitive area.

II

There are two ways in which the competition of a given dealer or manufacturer may be increased:

(a) By the establishment of a rival in the locality— the intensive way: (b) by the widening of the area of competition by improvement in facilities for communication and transportation-the extensive way.

So far as the local merchant is concerned one may be as disastrous as the other, since both mean division of trade. So far as the community is concerned the effects are different. In the first case a new shop is added to the sum total of all in existence (unless it has been moved from some other place); in the second case no new capital is invested or labor employed, save as some additional may be required by the larger establishments to take care of the trade absorbed from the smaller.

In times past it was competition of the intensive sort that men feared and resented. The local carpenter, bricklayer, blacksmith, miller, merchant, fought the newcomer as an intruder.

The medieval guilds were organized in large part to protect localities against intensive competition-competition within the gates. The modern labor union, with its restrictions regarding apprentices, its opposition to immigration, and its arbitrary requirement that unionists from other places must take out local cards-if they can-fights intensive competition, the intrusion of the stranger.

Formerly extensive competition-the competition of distant localities-was a negligible quantity, made so by dif