IS COMBINATION CRIME? 45 



for the material upon which she operates it. Mr. Hudson ap- 

 pears to infer that the smaller the manufacturer, the better off 

 the consumer and the wage- worker ; that the smaller he is, the 

 smaller his prices to the one and the higher his wages to the 

 other. I do not claim that the larger the shirt-dealer, the higher 

 the prices he pays to his seamstresses. I do not claim that the 

 soulless individual becomes soulful the moment he finds himself 

 incorporated (the epigram is the other way). But I do claim 

 that the converse is not the fact. I have not had Mr. Hudson's 

 opportunities, perhaps ; but, so far as the laws of human selfish- 

 ness and greed go, I happen to know that the larger the princi- 

 pal the more secure the wages of the wage-worker, and the scale 

 thereof at least not necessarily or even probably lower. 



The fact is (whether Mr. Hudson will ever become aware of 

 it is another and less important consideration), that the very first 

 thing a successful manufacturing combination does, and must 

 do, is to put the price of its product down to a figure where it 

 will not pay for designing speculators to form new stock com- 

 panies for it to " crush " at a hundred or more cents on a dollar. 

 For, did it keep up its prices, either one of two things would 

 inevitably happen: either new factories would be started, or 

 the inventive genius of this people would invent a substitute for 

 the product they furnished, and so ruin the combination beyond 

 resurrection. 



So rapidly have prices lowered, indeed, in the past, and so 

 constantly are they still falling, that earnest economists have 

 begun to wonder what the end would be ; and even the labor 

 agitators have turned from the (to them) seemingly abstract 

 question of hours and wages, as between the employer and the 

 employed, to fijid in this the supposed greatest peril of the lat- 

 ter. It even appears that one Powderly, a chief of one of the 

 so-called " labor movements," has made it the text of certain of 

 his harangues. And, with what Dickens would call perhaps " a 

 fatal freshness," Mr. Hudson himself (who has just left denying 

 the right of industries to centralize themselves because the first 

 thing they did after centralization was to put up prices), on the 

 next page, says, " Mr. Powderly has inveighed against the sin of 

 cheapness, and given his assent to the principle of combination 

 to raise prices, on the assumption that such combinations in- 

 volve an advance in wages." (Though to what purpose Mr. 

 Hudson has preserved this excerpt his context fails to discover, 

 since good faith to his own argument, if not to his readers, 

 should have led to its suppression.) 



But Mr. Hudson rattles on as follows : " It is an old truth 

 that commerce, founded on the basis of distributing the staples 

 of life at the least cost, is the highest practical benevolence; 



