Daily Inspiration Quote by Frederick Pollock

Pollock’s opening move - "So far I go with the Socialists" - is a lawyerly hedge that doubles as a provocation. He borrows the heat of a then-loaded label to frame his point as reluctant, reasoned, and therefore harder to dismiss. It’s a rhetorical judo throw: the Victorian liberal jurist conceding a premise to the ideological other side, not out of conversion but out of administrative common sense.

The key phrase is "where monopoly is necessary". Pollock isn’t romanticizing state power; he’s drawing a boundary around it. Some industries (utilities, rail, water, telegraphs - the networked infrastructure of modern life) trend toward natural monopoly because duplication is wasteful and the service is foundational. If competition can’t discipline pricing and access, he implies, the next best disciplinarian is accountability: public ownership, or at least public control, because the public is the captive customer.

"Pretty general rule" signals empiricism over dogma. Pollock speaks like a judge weighing precedent: not every market becomes a state project, but the burden of proof shifts when monopoly stops being an accident and becomes the operating condition.

The subtext is a warning about private monopoly as a form of private government. If a single firm must exist, it will write the terms of everyday life - rents, rates, exclusions - unless a democratic state holds the lever. In an era of rising trusts and municipal socialism, Pollock is staking a centrist-sounding position that quietly undercuts laissez-faire absolutism: capitalism is tolerable partly because, at the edges where it predictably fails, the public can step in without apologizing for it.