War annihilates values.
Slavery paralyzes the faculties.
Monopoly transfers wealth from one pocket to another, but it always occasions the loss of a portion in the transfer.
This is an admirable law. Without it, provided the strength of oppressors and oppressed were equal, spoliation would have no end.
A moment comes when the destruction of wealth is such that the despoiler is poorer than he would have been if he had remained honest.
So it is with a people when a war costs more than the booty is worth; with a master who pays more for slave labor than for free labor; with a priesthood which has so stupefied the people and destroyed its energy that nothing more can be gotten out of it; with a monopoly which increases its attempts at absorption as there is less to absorb, just as the difficulty of milking increases with the emptiness of the udder.
Monopoly is a species of the genus spoliation. It has many varieties, among them sinecure, privilege, and restriction upon trade.
Some of the forms it assumes are simple and naive, like feudal rights. Under this regime the masses are despoiled, and know it.
Other forms are more complicated. Often the masses are plundered, and do not know it. It may even happen that they believe that they owe every thing to spoliation, not only what is left them but what is taken from them, and what is lost in the operation. I also assert that, in the course of time, thanks to the ingenious machinery of habit, many people become spoilers without knowing it or wishing it. Monopolies of this kind are begotten by fraud and nurtured by error. They vanish only before the light.
I have said enough to indicate that political economy has a manifest practical use. It is the torch which, unveiling deceit and dissipating error, destroys that social disorder called spoliation. Some one, a woman I believe, has correctly defined it as "the safety-lock upon the property of the people."