50 J. A. H0BS0N 



porations. The growing power, and even a large measure of 

 real monopoly on the part of these corporations, is, of course, 

 quite consistent with the maintenance of keen and cut throat 

 competition over the greater part of the industrial field. 

 Though a larger absolute number of industries are being sub- 

 jected to the concentrative process, and are passing into the 

 form popularly known as trusts, there is no a priori reason to 

 suppose that there is a universal or even a general trend of 

 industry in this direction. The facts and figures indeed point 

 the other way; sound considerations of economy keep many 

 trades and manufactures in small or moderate sizes, and pre- 

 vent their merging. The former advance towards capitalistic 

 control of agriculture in large bonanza farms has yielded to 

 decentralizing forces; every important trust, by the very suc- 

 cess of its economy of capital and labor, liberates large masses 

 of industrial energy to apply themselves to new experimental 

 industries for the supply of new wants. America exhibits a 

 constant crop of these new enterprises, some of which even- 

 tually develop into trusts or are absorbed as subsidiary proc- 

 esses under trusts, but the great majority of them at any 

 given time are small struggling businesses dependent upon 

 individual enterprise. 



But while the present and probable future scope of con- 

 centrated capitalism is exaggerated in the public mind, these 

 trusts and corporations form a great power and a great peril 

 in American life. They have thrived most in some of the 

 great manufactures engaged in supplying common goods for 

 the necessary consumption of the people, such as oil, sugar, 

 thread or tobacco; or in controlling the produce markets in 

 grain, meat, and dairy products; in the development of iron 

 and coal, the prime necessaries of general industry; and in the 

 great transport industries which mean so much more to the 

 American than to the inhabitants of smaller and older coun- 

 tries with less need for transport and more facilities of roads. 

 The really formidable aspect of trusts and potent organiza- 

 tions of capital is their prevalence in just those industries en- 

 gaged in supplying common goods and services required by all, 

 necessaries or prime conveniences of life. They are not, of 

 course, confined to these industries; there are plenty of small 



