 the former order of things, even
if possible, would have involved returning to the day of stage-coaches.
Oppressive and intolerable as was the régime of the great consolidations of
capital, even its victims, while they cursed it, were forced to admit the
prodigious increase of efficiency which had been imparted to the national
industries, the vast economies effected by concentration of management and unity
of organization, and to confess that since the new system had taken the place of
the old the wealth of the world had increased at a rate before undreamed of. To
be sure this vast increase had gone chiefly to make the rich richer, increasing
the gap between them and the poor; but the fact remained that, as a means merely
of producing wealth, capital had been proved efficient in proportion to its
consolidation. The restoration of the old system with the subdivision of
capital, if it were possible, might indeed bring back a greater equality of
conditions, with more individual dignity and freedom, but it would be at the
price of general poverty and the arrest of material progress.
    Was there, then, no way of commanding the services of the mighty
wealth-producing principle of consolidated capital without bowing down to a
plutocracy like that of Carthage? As soon as men began to ask themselves these
questions, they found the answer ready for them. The movement toward the conduct
of business by larger and larger aggregations of capital, the tendency toward
monopolies, which had been so desperately and vainly resisted, was recognized at
last, in its true significance, as a process which only needed to complete its
logical evolution to open a golden future to humanity.
    Early in the last century the evolution was completed by the final
consolidation of the entire capital of the nation. The industry and commerce of
the country, ceasing to be conducted by a set of irresponsible corporations and
syndicates of private persons at their caprice and for their profit, were
intrusted to a single syndicate representing the people, to be conducted in the
common interest for the common profit. The nation, that is to say, organized as
the one great business corporation in which all other corporations were
absorbed; it became the one capitalist in the place of all other capitalists,
the sole employer, the final monopoly in which all previous and lesser
monopolies were swallowed up, a monopoly in the profits and economies of which
all citizens shared. The epoch of trusts had ended in The Great Trust. In a
word, the people of the United States concluded to assume the conduct of their
own business, just as one hundred odd years before they had assumed the conduct
of their
