"Thus Far and No Farther"

1916

These soaring prices every time any one can take advantage of a situation are among the things driving the nation forward to a time when all prices will have to be regulated and fixed as those of public service corporations now are, or to something much more radical. Such is the greed for money that very many men will take such advantage at every opportunity.

No well-informed, far-sighted person can for an instant think that our industrial system can go on many decades more without very material changes.

There isn't in reality any competition in business any more. Practically every line of business is a monopoly — a business of course that is open to others; but no matter how many go in the exclusive control continues. Prices are always fixed by those in the business, and the chances are that the more that go in the higher prices will be, for all have to live.

Of course something different will be worked out. No one can predict what it will be, whether it will be regulation by commissions, whether an industrial democracy, whether Socialism.

Standpat people can no more readily stop the trend than King Canute could the incoming tide when he said to the waves: "Thus far and no farther." — The Pacific.

No Monopoly of Brains

1905

Hopeful Sign That Proves This the Age of Opportunity

One of the most hopeful signs of the times is the apparent decay of the breed of so-called great men — those mighty personalities that in former times stood out like a solitary tree in a vast prairie.

The reason for it, of course, is the distinction of all those old-time monopolies of brains which stunted all human beings except a few who, by chance rather than by superiority of fibre, grew and developed. There are thousands, literally thousands, of men now living who, if they had lived a century or so ago and had done a work similar to which they are doing without any very sonorous fanfare upon the trumpets of fame, would have been the talk of the world and the main topic of history.

And how many of the so-called great achievements of so-called great statesmen, soldiers and thinkers of former times would be impossible to-day, because those achievements depended chiefly upon the ignorance and incapacity of the overwhelming mass of the men of their day!

Truly, this is the age of opportunity. — Saturday Evening Post.