ruption does not disappear when competition is practically eliminated, however. Some of the most difficult problems involved in dealing with it notoriously result from the existence of monopolies which have outstripped if they have not exterminated their rivals.

To attempt the adequate discussion of all the forms of economic corruption would require extended treatises on the labour problem, the trust problem, banking, transportation, insurance, and many other special subjects. The limitations of the present study exclude anything beyond a few general observations. It may first be noted that many of the abuses which are now undergoing the process of sanitation were the result not so much of corrupt intention as of ignorance and the relatively unlimited character of the competitive struggle to which reference has already been made. They emerged long before the era of consolidation, and are therefore not to be attributed solely to big business. For many years prior to the Chicago slaughter house exposures of 1906, for example, unclean meat was sold both by large packers and by country butchers. Small producers were and are largely responsible for impure milk and sweatshop clothing. Petty landlords as well as extensive holders of real estate have built unsanitary tenement houses and overcrowded them with renters. The neglect of transportation companies to install safety devices for the protection

of passengers and employees has in the very nature of the case been a corporation offence. On the other hand small as well as large mining operators have sinned in this way, and small as well as large manufacturers have exploited child labour. Betrayal of fiduciary relationships has naturally occurred most frequently and most disastrously in enterprises of large capital, although by no means confined exclusively to them. Indeed there would seem to be reason for believing that in certain ways consolidation has aided in bringing about the correction of some of these evils. It centres them in a few large establishments, often in a single district of no great size, where by their very magnitude abuses force themselves upon a sluggish public attention. Consolidation also makes it appear that the interests of a few selfish owners are being pursued at the cost of the general welfare. This at once enlists popular support for attacks upon abuses, and is a factor well worth comparison with the defensive strength of massed capital. For these reasons the cleaning up of the meat industry probably proceeded far more rapidly after the Chicago exposures than would have been the case if the effort had been made some years earlier during the period of many scattered local abattoirs.

So many factors co-operated in bringing about the business evils under consideration that the quality of corruption cannot always be ascribed to

them directly. Under a policy of laisser faire, oft unlimited competition, of public indifference and apathy, it is not easy to fix moral responsibility. Even the twentieth mean man at any given time may be only a little meaner than several of his nineteen competitors. His offences are dictated by self-interest, of course, but they are offences against a vague set of business customs or moral principles. Public interest suffers, it is true, but the public is apathetic; it has not laid down definite norms of business conduct. On the part of the offender there is often lacking that conscious and purposeful subordination of public to private interest which constitutes full fledged corruption. Whatever degree of extenuation is afforded by these considerations vanishes, however, when definite regulation is undertaken by the state. Now x that we are fairly launched upon an era of legislative and administrative control, business offences of the kind under consideration are frankly corrupt. Public apathy has vanished, the interest of the public has been sharply defined, and he who in contravention of these norms places his private gain above the general welfare does so with full intent, and cannot evade or shift the accusation of corruption.

A further consequence of the effort to regulate business practice by law is not only intrinsically important but also serves as the great connecting link between primarily economic and political cor

ruption proper. As soon as regulation is undertaken by the state a motive is supplied to the still unterrified twentieth mean man to break the law or to bribe its executors. In either case, by the way, the profits are directly conditioned by the thoroughness with which his competitors are restrained from following his own malpractices. The scales employed by tariff officials may be tampered with in the interests of large importers whose profits are thereby enormously increased. Or inspectors may be bribed to pass infected carcasses, to approve impure milk, to permit get-rich-quick concerns to use the mails, to wink at lead weighted life preservers, to ignore the fact that the exits of a theatre are entirely inadequate. With cases where state regulation supplied the motive for the direct commission of fraud we are not directly concerned here, but in all the cases where the collusion of inspectors is involved we have to note that government regulation of business has made easy the transmutation of what before was merely corrupt and morally offensive into direct bribery. And from the point of view of a venal official or political machine the extension of state control means the widening of the opportunities for levying tribute. Thus a form of corruption which began among, and for a time was limited to, business relations becomes under regulation a menace to political integrity. In other words, it takes on the form of political corruption as well, and must,

therefore, become the subject of discussion in that connection.

However disheartening in other ways, a consideration of the forms of business corruption yields the comforting reflection that all the major forms of evil in this field are clearly recognised and severely criticised. One must guard oneself against too cheerful optimism in the premises, however. Reform forces armed cap-a-pie do not spring like unheralded knight errants of old into every breach at which social integrity is being assailed. Instead they can be developed only by persistent individual and associated effort and sacrifice. Moreover the problem of corruption, as we have seen, is a persistent one, the forms of which are ever changing and ever requiring new ingenuity and resourcefulness in the methods of social sanitation. Back of reform effort, also, there remains much that the individual can affect simply by clearer habits of moral reflection and action even in the small affairs of life. Public sentiment is built of such individual fragments. Low opinion, low action in everyday affairs become a part of the psychological atmosphere befogged by which the outlines even of the larger evils of the present régime grow indistinct. Professor Ross has performed a valuable service by exposing the fallacy that "sinners should be chastised only by their betters."

Social life, indeed, would be inconceiv

1" Sin and Society," p. 78.