76 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



on a par with production and distribution — which is gathered under 

 the one comprehensive term: modern business. 



The most striking characteristic of modern business is the rapidity 

 with which it is moving from a competitive to a cooperative basis. 

 This is resulting, on one hand, in the " trusts " and other combinations, 

 which furnish so much good copy for the newspaper and the congress- 

 man ; on another hand, in the public service corporations, wherein 

 quasi-public needs are supplied by quasi-private bodies; on another 

 hand, in that genuine cooperative production and distribution with 

 which we are less familiar than are the Europeans ; and, finally, in that 

 public ownership, pure and simple, which the modem politicians are 

 falling over one another in their haste to promise to the people in ex- 

 change for the people's votes. 



In whatever form it may appear, however, cooperation results in two 

 things: bigness and complexity. When two men form a partnership 

 the profits may be out of all proportion to the business paraphernalia. 

 But when oil producers get together, and then (at the behest of Con- 

 gress) unmix themselves again; when the subways, elevated roads and 

 surface lines knit themselves into a single great transportation cobweb; 

 Avhen tlie workingmen of a whole county decide to buy their flour at 

 a single purchase ; and when forty cities and towns combine to supply 

 themselves with water; then there result not only a bigness that has 

 taught us to talk in billions as easily as our fathers talked in hundreds 

 of dollars, but also a complexity which staggers us poor outsiders and, 

 there is reason to believe, staggers the insiders as well. 



The third feature of modern business, growing naturally out of the 

 characteristics of bigness and complexity, is tliat profits to-day are 

 made by the geometrical progression of innumerable small gains in- 

 stead of through the adding together of a few large gains. Selling a 

 few hundred things at a good profit in a country store in Xew York 

 state brought in to Mr. ^Voolworth's employer a few thousand dollars 

 a year. Selling millions of things for not exceeding ten cents each has 

 enabled Mr. Woolworth himself to capitalize at $75,000,000, and to 

 erect the highest building in the world. The mining fortunes of yes- 

 terday were made by working the richest veins and pockets, leaving the 

 rest to waste. The mining fortunes of to-morrow will be made from 

 the dump-heaps of abandoned plants. The day of the telescope in 

 business, the day of seeking new worlds in order rudely to exploit 

 their natural resources, has gone by ; and the day of the microscope in 

 business, of getting infinitesimal profits infinitely multiplied, has come. 

 Thus far we have been a world of wasters ; henceforth we are to be a 

 world of savers, and are thus to outwit Malthus and to make the world's 

 resources not less, but greater, by ever}'^ added baby born. 



A marked characteristic of modern business, consequently, is (in 

 merchandizing) frequent "turn-overs," and (in manufacturing) the 



