The chairman of a district milk union argues against letting a private collector buy milk in even one of the union's forty-two collection villages: 'Open one village to him and within three years the union will have no village of its own left.' Which of the following is an assumption on which the chairman's argument depends?

The chairman's fear is not of the one village but of the forty-one behind it, and the slide he predicts can only happen if nothing stands in its way. Grant that the union may write into the permission that it covers this village alone, and the argument for refusing the first village collapses, since the first no longer carries the rest with it. Whether the collector is licensed bears on whether he may buy at all, not on how far he would spread. What the forty-two villages produce and how the union treated earlier applicants describe the union's position and its habits, and the argument would run exactly as it does whatever the answers to those turned out to be.