308 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



rebuke which has ended in legislative enactment designed to pre- 

 vent a continuance of the real or apparent abuse. The discharge 

 of employees, the reduction of wages, the raising of prices, the 

 decrease of production, whether justifiable or not, antagonize the 

 immediate interests of a greater or less proportion of the popula- 

 tion whose discontent often finds voice through men who, whether 

 sincere or guided by self-interest in their protestations, are utterly 

 unable to trace the ramifications of cause and effect throughout 

 the complications of the industrial and commercial web. And 

 such men, clothed with the power of legal enactment, have given 

 force to statutes that have tended to kill instead of to cure. But 

 it can not be denied that the desire for gain, without due regard 

 for justice, has led men charged with the administration of indus- 

 trial organizations into actions that have abundantly justified 

 public complaint and severe punishment, and many organizations 

 have been formed because of the facility for public aggression 

 attained by combined action and the absence of individual re- 

 sponsibility ; and all that has been reprehensible in the acts of 

 such organizations, gaining a greater or less publicity, has tended 

 to obscure the perception of the benefits of industrial combination 

 as a whole. 



The enumeration of the evils attendant upon combined action 

 leads to the perception that they did not spring into existence at 

 any one period of industrial development, but that they are the 

 outgrowth of not properly restrained actions, arising from motives 

 that exist in individuals, and were manifested in the actions of 

 individuals before the tendency toward combination became no- 

 ticeable, and have been manifested with increasing conspicuity at 

 each of the stages of combination. In other words, the vices and 

 virtues of aggregations of men are but the vices and virtues of 

 individual men, and vice and virtue alike become intensified as 

 they are manifested in the actions of an aggregation of men con- 

 trolled by leaders of whom they are characteristic. Opportunity 

 for dispute as to the rate of wages and the hours of labor arose 

 when there were first employer and employee. It is the very trad- 

 ing instinct to sell at the highest price and purchase at the lowest. 

 The mean and the crafty have ever sought to obtain money with- 

 out repaying it, to obtain privilege without compensation, to gain 

 advantage over others by fair means or foul. As it has been the 

 increase of intelligence and morality and accumulated experience 

 that has led to a wider justice between individual men, so must it 

 be the increase of intelligence, morality, and accumulated experi- 

 ence that will lead to the allotment of justice between individual 

 man and an aggregation of men, and between aggregation and 

 aggregation. 



The very hugeness of the more recent industrial combinations 



