132 COMMERCE AND EXCHANGE 



facturer, and the latter, in many lines of trade, now dictates the 

 retail profit and protects it by exclusive agencies, price contracts, 

 and the factor and serial numbering plans. 



I have no wish to over-emphasize the tendencies I have presented. 

 Many of them are not as yet prevailing tendencies, but if all of them 

 taken collectively establish the fact that manufacturing in this 

 country is assuming mercantile functions, it is a subject worthy of 

 serious study. It involves the internal economy of businesses, 

 because up to this time it has been an axiom of trade that it is 

 dangerous for a business man or a corporation to undertake two 

 kinds of business the fundamental principles of which are entirely 

 distinct. It involves also larger considerations of the national 

 economy, because the three great categories of industry, raw material, 

 production or agriculture, manufacture, and trade, have, in the 

 period previous to this, been distinct, and a change in the domestic 

 market more fundamental than the coalescence of two of these or 

 the dominance of one by the other would be hard to imagine. 



