which they can deal with better. Some years ago I met, in Germany, a German who was doing business in Russia. I asked him if it was not hard to carry on business there under the interferences and exactions of the police. "Oh, no!" said he, "it is much better than here in Germany. If there is a regulation there which bothers you, you arrange to pay so much to the police, and you hear no more of the regulation. Here in Germany, if they put a regulation on you, you have to obey it." I cannot agree, however, with that estimate of things. It is short-sighted; it is certain to reach its own limit. If we want to go on and prosper indefinitely, we must have energy and enterprise in economics, with few and good laws, just courts, and honest police. What we want good laws and good government for is not to keep the masters of industry from doing wrong, but to hold the parts of the industrial organization in harmony. The system of preventing a man from doing wrong by setting another to watch and control him is false, because the whole community would have to be turned, at last, into a great series of watchers and watched, and wickedness would flourish more than it does now.
Let me call your attention to another fact which seems to me to mark the using up of our political institutions. If we have a tribunal established to fix freight rates, we may call it a "court," but it will have to decide economic questions, not judicial questions. It cannot be a court. We shall call it so, in order to try to get for it the prestige which now belongs to the most unspoiled part of our political system. The only similar institution known to me is the Irish court for fixing rents. The economic parallel between rents in Europe and freight rates in America is very close and real. Rates are prices; they result from a conflict of interests; and the conflict is
