The Conflict between Private Monopoly and Good Citizenship

sm between monopoly and good citizenship. Anthracite coal is not a business apart--it is a railroad business; and if there are abuses, they cannot be corrected apart from railroad regulation. There is nothing that we now need to know so thoroughly as that the railroad is the one key to the control of all monopolies, including those that often last just long enough to gut the properties according to get-rich-quick principles. The waste of the public wealth under this concentrated stimulus is the darkest economic fact, as the ugliest political fact is the corruption of officials and legislators. Think of a product so vital to the future as the forests; and then picture, if you can, the waste and despoiling of this strictly common wealth that has gone on, and still goes on, in connection with unregulated railroad affiliations,--properties, larger than several Eastern states, stolen, and then burned, and skinned, and devastated, so that two generations cannot repair the loss! And now by highest federal authority