IS COMBINATION CRIME? 49 



ploy them, and to do the most extensive hauling for those who 

 had the largest bulk of hauling for them to do. They were not 

 authorized by their acts of incorporation to first demand cer- 

 tificates of good moral character, or afiidavits that the would-be 

 customer was not a combination of individuals or stockholders 

 in a trust or a private corporation. And yet, superfluous as this 

 statement is, it is actually out of such familiar truisms as these 

 (it is difficult to treat the simpleness of the situation without 

 tautology) that Mr. Hudson raises figment after figment and 

 chimera after chimera to disturb and alarm the non-producing 

 and manufacturing classes of this already imperiled commu- 

 nity! And the purport of these figments and the portent of 

 these chimeras is always that any use of capital in bulk is crime 

 against this people and this republic ; and that the incorpora- 

 tion for business purposes " stands in " with some railway com- 

 pany or all railway companies, because incorporations — and es- 

 pecially railway incorporations — hate the bread-winner and the 

 wage- worker, and desire that he be crushed and swept from the 

 face of the earth ; in other words, are feudal, mediseval, and un- 

 patriotic. That is the whole text and comment of Mr. Hudson's 

 elocution. Even feudalism itself was not a curse. It was a prop- 

 er and convenient institution for its day and date ; considering 

 the popular ignorance and helplessness, anything else would have 

 been a less tolerable tyranny. It was the growth of circum- 

 stances, rather than — as Mr. Hudson thinks — the forcing of an 

 arbitrary situation by the strong and aristocratic upon the ple- 

 beian and the weak : so, to begin with, granting Mr. Hudson's 

 favored and capitalist class, and granting that they " force " any 

 condition of things upon the non-capitalist class, the analogy of 

 this state of things to the institution of feudalism is false and 

 misleading. But feudalism was more than a situation. It was 

 the only form in which the society of the unletteped and forma- 

 tive civilization could be held together at all — the only one 

 which could, on the one hand, curb the despotism of thrones, 

 while on the other conserving the safety and tranquillity of the 

 people. It was the mother of parliamentary government and of 

 civil liberty, to which — in the fullness of time — it yielded and 

 disappeared. 



To give a meaning to Mr. Hudson's vision of an analogy be- 

 tween modern industrial centralization and feudalism, let us 

 assume, however, that he means (he does not say so) the mediae- 

 val trade-guilds. Now, these trade-guilds, perhaps, were an ac- 

 companiment of — certainly they were contemporary with — the 

 institution of feudalism. Moreover, they were broken up and 

 wiped away by the very institution which Mr. Hudson can not 

 find words enough to stigmatize as the root of every modern 



TOL. ZXXIII. — 4 



