ECONOMIC CAUSES OF DEPLETION 63 



modem canal systom. The means of communication 

 thus begun, augmented by the advent of the steamboat 

 in 1807, and the railroad in 1830, rendered possible the 

 massing of factories in great cities. New York ranked 

 ninth of the cities of the United States in 1820, with 

 but 9,000 people to Albany's 90,000, and was being still 

 further o\itclassed. Her true growth began with the 

 opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, but her rapid ex- 

 pansion about 1839 with the advent of the modern 

 steamship. The Bessemer process, 1856, giving the 

 steel rail instead of the iron one, cut the cost of railway 

 haulage in half. Power transmission in 1891 rendered 

 possible a still greater concentration by placing fac- 

 tories, not at the place of the source of power, but at the 

 foci of transport and centres of trade. The average cost 

 of transport in 1800 was ten dollars per ton per hun- 

 dred miles. As I write a carload of mill-feed has just 

 come into Spcncerville from Brandon. The cost of 

 transport is four dollars per ton for one thousand five 

 hundred miles. For wheat and flour the cost was then 

 prohibitive at two hundred miles distance. Now they 

 can be profitably carried by rail and sea the semi-cir- 

 cumference of the earth. 



Another concurrent change has had an equally great 

 effect in industrial organization. The incorporated 

 company was called into being by the need for larger 

 aggregations of capital ; the corpf)rat(i trust — of which 

 the Standard Oil Trust, originating in 1881, was tlic 

 prototype — was designed to eliminate the wastes of coin- 

 petition, but has been used to limit production, control 

 price.*?, and monopolize markets. Thus has arisen an 

 industrial economy which Bvndicates each form of pro- 



