REMEDIAL THEORIES AND EXPERIMENTS 179 



similar reasons. Such, at least, is my personal 

 conviction. It is idle, however, to expect that any 

 large municipality in America will be persuaded to 

 undertake the production and distribution of its 

 milk supply for a long time to come. 



In the first place, the industry itself must first 

 undergo great changes in the direction of concen- 

 tration before such a plan will become practicable. 

 It is a well-established law of economic evolution 

 that collective ownership and control follows when 

 the organization of the machinery of production 

 and distribution has been more or less perfected 

 under capitalistic ownership and control. There 

 are exceptions to this, as to every other rule, but 

 only enough to establish its general validity. Now, 

 economically, the milk trade is one of the most prim- 

 itive and undeveloped of all our great industries, 

 as it is also scientifically the most backward. Milk 

 production has scarcely been touched at all by the 

 tendency to concentration manifested in so many 

 other branches of industry. It is an unorganized, 

 petty industry, carried on by a large number of 

 small capitalists, many of whom are little better 

 off than ordinary wage-workers. Skilled labor, 

 though it has been shown to be absolutely neces- 

 sary to the realization of good results, has not yet 

 been introduced into the industry, and, in fact, does 

 not exists Mechanical appliances, such as milking 



