o a bigger and more paying business than his rivals. Each
uses to the full, and without scruple, all the economic advantages of
size, skill in production, knowledge of markets, attractive
price-lists, and methods of advertisement which he possesses. It is
quite true that so long as there is competition among a number of
fairly equal businesses the consuming public may gain to some extent
by this competition, whereas the normal result of the successful
establishment of a Trust is simply to enable its owners to take higher
profits by raising prices to the consumer. But this does not
constitute a difference in the mode of competition, so that in this
case it deserves to be called "fair," in the other "unfair."

It is even doubtful whether such bargains as that above described
between the Standard Oil Company and the Railways, whereby a
discriminative rate was maintained in favour of the Company, is
"unfair," though it was underhand and illegal. In the ordinary sense
of the term it was a "free" contract between the Railways and the Oil
Company, and in spite of its discriminative character might have been
publicly maintained had the law not interfered on a technical point.
The same is even true of the flagrant act of discrimination described
by Mr. Baker:--"A combination among manufacturers of railway
car-springs, which wished to ruin an independent competitor, not only
agreed with the American Steel Association that the independent
company should be charged $10 per ton more for steel than the members
of the combine, but raised a fund to be used as follows: when the
independent company made a bid on a contract for springs, one of the
members of the Trust was authorised to under-bid at a price which
would incur a loss, which was to be paid out of the fund. In this way
the competing company was to be driven out of business."[140] These
cases differ only in their complexity from the simpler modes of
underselling a business rival. Mean, underhand, and perhaps illegal
many of these tactics are, but after all they differ rather in degree
than in kind from the tactics commonly practised by most businesses
engaged in close commercial warfare. If they are "unfair," it is only
in the sense that all coercion of the weak by the strong is "unfair,"
a verdict which doubtless condemns from any moral standpoint the whole
of trade competition, so far as it is not confined to competing
excellence of production.

The only exercise of power b