means of reckless and profitless competition. There is a growing outcry for fair trade as against the foreigner, but fair trade is also wanted in many important branches of industry at home. Private manufacturers and merchants begin to look askance, and with good reason, at the joint-stock companies that are crowding into their best markets. These do not compete on equal terms, as the private traders do among themselves. When markets are falling, and prices have to be reduced, the joint-stock companies keep on cutting long after private traders have been brought to the verge of bankruptcy. They have in every way more latitude. If they earn no profit, the directors have only to express their sympathy with the poor shareholders, and lay the blame on the bad times. If they incur heavy losses, they can call up more capital on pain of going into liquidation. In a shipping or a manufacturing company, repairs and plant may be neglected, or the requisite allowance for depreciation may be stinted, in order to swell dividends. Costly experiments – as, for instance, ocean-racing across the Atlantic – may be engaged in, which the enterprising experimenters would have been more chary of had they been staking only their own money. But when "the company pays" is taken for a motto, various games may be played which are not worth the candle.
It is cruel to investors that they should be the scapegoats of so much of the showy but unprofitable enterprise that is forcing its way into the chief industries of the country. It is cruel to these industries, and to the private capitalists engaged in them, that they should have to bear the brunt of a competition which has practically no responsibility, and hardly any restriction. It is mischievous to the community that while men who trade with their own money have to act with the fear of bankruptcy before their eyes, men who trade with other people's money have virtually carte blanche to throw it away, and as much more as they can persuade their dupes to throw after it. Tens of thousands of pounds are being yearly pitched into the Atlantic by joint-stock shipping companies, which would have been saved, every penny of it, had the bulk of our commercial navy been still privately owned as it was ten or fifteen years ago. The private owners who survive foresee that they will have to give in one day. To compete with managers who are paid all the same whether they show a profit or a loss, is as hard a task as Earl Granville's playing at diplomacy with Prince Bismarck.
Joint-stock industrial companies have greatly complicated the existing depression, and disguised some of its worst features. They create a certain amount of employment for labour beyond real requirements, and in so doing they bolster up wages; but the wages are not actually earned. They come out of the pockets of shareholders, who have to go without dividends, or to make good great losses. When the comfort and contentment of the working classes are thrown in the teeth of those who complain of bad trade, it is ignored that to a considerable extent the working classes are living on unfortunate investors. If the trade and industry of the country had remained wholly in private hands, there would now be thousands more factories closed or running short
