It is sometimes supposed that because I praised the free market, I would object to any interference with the great firms of your age. The supposition mistakes my argument. The market I described was never a lawless thing. It was always meant to operate within a framework of institutions, of contract and of law, and among those institutions is the standing guard against monopoly, which I named plainly as the enemy of the public.

Consider what one of these firms has in truth become. It has not merely made a better instrument and sold it, which is the honest path to fortune and which I would defend against any leveller. It has made itself the sovereign of the commerce that passes through the instrument. A toll levied at such a position, set by a single house and answerable to no rival, is not, in the categories of political economy, a price. It is a tax, and a tax laid by a private hand upon a public traffic is precisely the mischief the institutions of a commercial society exist to prevent.

The test has always been the same. Can the citizen, finding the toll oppressive, turn aside to another road? Where there are many gates, let each keeper charge what he will, for the discipline of competition will correct him. Where there is, in effect, one gate, that discipline is absent, and the public interest must be defended by other means.

To restrain such a firm is not to punish its success, nor to interfere with the division of labour that makes a people rich. It is to return the firm to the conditions under which productivity, and not mere extraction, becomes the road to its prosperity. That is not an exception to my system. It is my system, correctly understood.