60 J. A. HOBSON 



of the new capitalism, it cannot be said that any fixed general 

 feeling of hostility against the power of the triangle of capital- 

 ist forces — railroads, finance, industrial trusts — exists in the 

 general body of the people. A considerable insurrection 

 against the dominion of local corporations handling municipal 

 monopolies is everywhere on foot in the larger cities; spas- 

 modic revolts against railroad monopolies or discrimination 

 over wider areas occur, but no clear signs of a steady settled 

 determination to break the power of the great national trusts 

 are yet visible. There is indeed a sort of socialist party, 

 broken into many groups, which takes as one of its mottoes, 

 "Let the nation own the trusts." In the municipal and state 

 elections of 1902 some 300,000 votes were cast throughout 

 America for "socialist" candidates, and the rise of a numeri- 

 cally powerful party in the future must be regarded as a pos- 

 sibility. But for the present this definitely socialist senti- 

 ment and policy are not a serious factor in the situation. The 

 feeling is rather one of growing disquietude and perplexity 

 than of urgent alarm. There is a growing recognition among 

 thinking persons of all classes that trusts have come to stay, 

 that they are capable of using anti-social powers, and that it 

 will be necessary to find public methods of restraining them. 

 So far as any policy is developing in the general mind it is 

 temperamental individualism of the American, and is directed 

 towards a restoration of the competition which trusts seek to 

 destroy, rather than at the socialization of industries from 

 which competition is recognized to have disappeared. 



If some sort of semblance of competition is retained, if 

 good wages are paid and employees are fairly treated, if no 

 considerable actual rise of prices oppresses the consumer, the 

 general temper of Americans favors a policy of laissez faire. 

 A trust may be a virtual monopoly, it may regulate produc- 

 tion and control local markets, it may take for itself all the 

 economies of improved methods of production, and of the 

 elimination of expensive competition, distributing them in 

 dividends on watered stock, but these things will arouse no 

 effective sentiment of animosity in the public mind. The real 

 danger arises when some great corporation opposes a large 

 organization of labor, as in the Homestead and the Pullman 



