48 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ing to Mr. Hudson, however, these tendencies, laws, and rules do 

 not amount to so very much. It is an easy enough matter to 

 handle them. "We have only to legislate railway companies out 

 of existence, and then enact statutes forbidding two of the same 

 trade to combine. Then things will run smoothly. The State 

 will hold the trackage of the late railroad companies as a high- 

 way ; and every dealer, manufacturer, agriculturist, miner, will 

 carry his product to and fro, and — there you are ! No more 

 modern feudalism ; nothing but peace, plenty, and communism ! 

 Faulconridge would not fright boys with bugs, but a moral 

 drawn from the middle ages, by reason of its mere remoteness, 

 appears always to be a powerful antic with which to worry the 

 non-capitalist imagination. Any combination of like interests 

 for business purposes — the copartnership formed by three but- 

 ter-dealers or six coal-miners to continue the business of selling 

 butter or mining coal ; the corporation, or " trust," or combina- 

 tion formed by amalgamation of any existing companies — is a 

 palpable return to the days of feudalism. Thus, the present 

 system of combinations becomes "modern feudalism." Your 

 combinations are so large that they build up a favored and aris- 

 tocratic class, like the old crown vassals. And again, these in- 

 dustrial combinations are hand and glove with the railways, and 

 so form a network of capital in the meshes of which the poor 

 man is strangled. Now, the simple facts upon which Mr. Hud- 

 son assumes to found this hue and cry are these, viz. : The nor- 

 mal tendency of trade to trade-centers, where it can be most 

 conveniently handled, has its inevitable corollary in the tend- 

 ency, within the trade-center, to centralization of the different 

 branches of trade. In the middle ages the principle operated 

 to build uj) such imperial centers as Nuremberg, Antwerp, and 

 London, and the corollary to organize, within those centers, the 

 great trade-guilds. In later years the Atlantic Ocean, the Hud- 

 son River, and Long Island Sound combined to make New York 

 city an emporium for the deposit and distribution of the prod- 

 ucts and industries of two continents, while the merely innocent 

 convenience of traders within that city (not any aristocratic or 

 would-be feudal motives on their part) operated to root and 

 group the leather interest into one quarter, cotton goods into 

 another, oils and provisions and iron-mongery into still others. 

 And if two or more traders in an identical staple, iinding them- 

 selves neighbors or united in a community of interest, saw fit 

 to bind themselves into a single firm or trading company, it was 

 no matter of conspiracy against the public weal, but the merest 

 consideration of personal convenience and facility. When the 

 railroads came, they found themselves obliged — ^by the very char- 

 ters which created them— to haul for anybody who chose to em- 



