59 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



capitalists, but by great capitals. In every trade the standard of ne- 

 cessary size, the minimum establishment that can hold its own in com- 

 petition, is constantly and rapidly raised. The little men are ground 

 out, and the littleness that dooms men to destruction waxes year by 

 year. Of the (British) cotton-mills of the last century, a few here and 

 there are standing, saved by local or other accidents, while their rivals 

 have either grown to gigantic size or fallen into ruin. The survivors 

 with steam substituted for water-power, with machinery twice or thrice 

 renewed, are worked while they pay one half or one fourth per cent 

 on their cost. The case of other textile manufactures is the same or 

 stronger still. Steel and iron are yet more completely the monopoly 

 of gigantic plants. The chemical trade was for a long time open to 

 men of very moderate means. Recent inventions threaten to turn the 

 plant that has cost millions to waste brick and old lead. Already 

 nothing but a trade agreement, temporary in its nature, has prevented 

 the closing of half the (chemical) factories of St. Helen's and Widnes, 

 and the utter ruin of all the smaller ownei*s. Every year the same 

 thing happens in one or another of our minor industries." 



Such changes in the direction of the concentration of production 

 by machinery in large establishments are, moreover, in a certain and 

 large sense, not voluntary on the part of the possessors and controllers 

 of capital, but necessary or even compulsory. If an eighth or a six- 

 teenth of a cent a pound is all the profit that competition and mod- 

 ern improvements will permit in the business of refining sugar, such 

 business has got to be conducted on a large scale to admit of the re- 

 alization of any profit. An establishment fitted up with all modern 

 improvements and refining the absolutely large but comparatively 

 small quantity, of a million pounds per annum, could realize, at a 

 sixteenth of a cent a pound profit on its work, but 8623. Accord- 

 ingly, the successful refiner of sugars of to-day, in place of being as 

 formerly a manufacturer exclusively, must now, as a condition of full 

 success, be his own importer, do his own lighterage, own his own 

 wharfs and warehouses, make his own barrels and boxes, prepare his 

 own bone-black, and ever be ready to discard and replace his expen- 

 sive machinery with every new improvement. But to do all this suc- 

 cessfully requires not only the command of large capital, but of busi- 

 ness qualifications of the very highest order two conditions that but 

 comparatively few can command. It is not, therefore, to be won- 

 dered at that, under the advent of these new conditions, one half of 

 the sugar-refineries that were in operation in the seaboard cities of 

 the United States in 1875 have since failed or discontinued opera- 

 tions. 



The census returns of the United States are also very instructive 

 on this point. Between 1850 and 1860, the number of manufacturing 

 firms and corporations in the United States increased from 123,025 to 

 140,433, and the value of manufactured products increased from 



