CONCENTRATION OF INDUSTRY 57 



already gone far towards the establishment of a single great 

 monetary power outside and beyond the effective control of 

 the government, but usurping some of the functions of the 

 state. The most salient fact to-day in America is the financial 

 control of the chief means of transport by land and sea, the 

 mining industry, and the manufacturing trusts by several 

 small groups of men, partly bankers who have entered indus- 

 try, partly industrial magnates who have entered the wider 

 world of finance. It is impossible to ascertain, or accurately 

 to designate, the relations between these little groups of po- 

 tentates — sometimes engaged in fighting one another in Wall 

 street or in the courts for the control of a system of railways, 

 sometimes united for a common swoop upon the products of 

 small investors, sometimes in mixed relations of friendship 

 or hostility over a corner in the produce markets. Industry 

 in America no longer belongs to industrialists but to financiers. 

 In the railroad world Morgan and Rockefeller and Havemeyer 

 are in joint control with more distinctively railroad men like 

 Hill and Harriman, and the forces are commonly described 

 by the name of some great Wall street general. So important 

 is the financial side of the great manufacturing businesses that 

 their chiefs inevitably drift into the larger financial world, so 

 that the owners of the standard oil, the steel, the sugar and 

 other trusts are continually associated with fresh alien enter- 

 prises. 



While the identification of the great financiers of Wall 

 street with the control of the railroad system of America is 

 the most fundamental fact, the growing prominence of trans- 

 port and finance enables these groups to exercise a general 

 control over great organized industry. Everywhere this con- 

 solidation of financial control is accompanied by a centraliza- 

 tion of business management. It is not indeed strictly true 

 that capital is passing into fewer hands, for in America as 

 here the structure of the corporation lends itself to a multipli- 

 cation of investors, and in some corporations a new labor policy 

 is projected along this line. But while the number of capital- 

 ists, or investors, is increasing, the control and probably the 

 ownership of the bulk of capital is passing into fewer hands. 

 For the great financiers are becoming to a larger extent than 



