the consuming public.

Hence it arises that the prices paid by the consumer for farm produce
are picked pretty clean by various groups of monopolists or restricted
competitors before any of them get back to the farmers or first
producers.

The farmer, from his position in the industrial machine, is more at
the mercy of Trusts and other combinations than any other body of
producers. In the United States he is helpless under the double sway
of the railway and the syndicate of grain elevators and of
slaughterers in Chicago, Kansas City, and elsewhere. In England, in
France, and in all countries where the farmer is at a long distance
from his market, farm produce is subject to this natural process of
concentration, and we hear the same complaints of the oppressive rates
of the railway and the monopoly of the groups of middlemen who form
close combinations where the stream of produce narrows to a neck on
its flow to the consumer. The position of the American farmer, crushed
between the upper and the nether mill-stone of monopoly, is one of
pathetic impotence.

(3) In those industries to which the most elaborate and expensive
machinery is applied, and where, in consequence, the proportion of
fixed capital to labour is largest, the economies of large-scale
production are greatest. Here, as we have seen, the growing strain of
the fiercer competition of ever larger and ever fewer capitals drives
towards the culminating concentration of the Trust. Where, owing
either to natural advantages, as in the case of oil and coal, or to
other social and industrial reasons, a manufacture is confined within
a certain district, and is in the hands of a limited number of firms
in fairly close commercial touch with one another, we have conditions
favouring the formation of a Trust. In most of the successful
manufacturing Trusts some natural economy of easy access to the best
raw material, special facilities of transport, the possession of some
state or municipal monopoly of market, are added to the normal
advantages of large-scale production. The artificial barriers in the
shape of tariff, by which foreign competition has been eliminated from
many leading manufactures in the United States, have greatly
facilitated the successful operation of Trusts. Where the political,
natural, and industrial forces are strongly combined, we have the most
favourable soil for the Trust. Where a manufacture can be carried on
in any part of the country, and