business, takes his place behind the counter of some monster house.

Sec. 2. How Competition affects Capital.--Now the force which brings about
all these movements is the force of competition. Every increase of
knowledge, every improvement of communication, every breakdown of
international or local barriers, increases the advantage of the big
business, and makes the struggle for existence among small businesses
more keen and more hopeless. It is the desire to escape from the heavy
and harassing strain of trade competition, which practically drives
small businesses to suspend their mutual hostilities, and to combine. It
is true that most of the large private businesses or joint stock
companies are not formed by this direct process of pacification. But for
all that, their _raison d'etre_ is found in the desire to escape the
friction and waste of competition which would take place if each
shareholder set up business separately on his own account. We shall not
be surprised that the competition of small businesses has given way
before co-operation, when we perceive the force and fierceness of the
competition between the larger consolidated masses of capital. With the
development of the arts of advertising, touting, adulteration, political
jobbery, and speculation, acting over an ever-widening area of
competition, the fight between the large joint stock businesses grows
always more cruel and complex. Business failures tend to become more
frequent and more disastrous. A recent French economist reckons that ten
out of every hundred who enter business succeed, fifty vegetate, and
forty go into bankruptcy. In America, where internal competition is
still keener and speculation more rife, it has been lately calculated
that ninety-five per cent, of those who enter business "fail of
success." Just as in the growth of political society the private
individual has given up the right of private war to the State, with the
result that as States grow stronger and better organized, the war
between them becomes fiercer and more destructive, so is it with the
concentration of capital. The small capitalist, seeking to avoid the
strain of personal competition, amalgamates with others, and the
competition between these masses of capital waxes every day fiercer. We
have no accurate data for measuring the diminution of the number of
separate competitors which has attended the growing concentration of
capital, but we know that the average magnitude o