ushed out the smaller companies, entered into a
close arrangement with the remaining competitors, with the view of a
practical consolidation of the businesses into one, though the formal
identity of the several firms was still maintained. The various
companies which entered into this union, comprising nearly all the chief
oil-mills, submitted their businesses to valuation, and placed
themselves in the hands of a board of trustees, with an absolute power
to regulate the quantity of production, and if necessary to close mills,
to raise and lower prices, and to work the whole number as a joint
concern. Each company gave up its shares to the Trust, receiving notes
of acknowledgment for the worth of the shares, and the total profits
were to be divided as dividend each half-year. This Trust has continued
to exist, and has now a practical monopoly of the oil trade in America,
controlling, it is reckoned, more than 90 per cent. of the whole market,
and regulating production and prices.

Everywhere this process is at work. Competing firms are in every trade,
where their small numbers permit, striving to come to closer terms than
formerly, and either secretly or openly joining forces so as to get full
control over the production or distribution of some product, in order to
manipulate prices for their own profit. From railways and corn-stores
down to slate-pencils, coffins, and sticking-plaster, everything is
tending to fall under the power of a Trust. Many of these Trusts fail to
secure the union of a sufficient proportion of the large competitors, or
quarrels spring up among the combining firms, or some new firms enter
into competition too strong to be fought or bought over. In these ways a
large number of the Trusts have hitherto broken down, and will doubtless
continue to break down. In England, this step in capitalist evolution is
only beginning to be taken. In glass, paper, salt, coal, and a few other
commodities, combinations more permanent than the mere Ring or Corner,
and closer than the ordinary masters' unions, have been formed. But Free
Trade, which leaves us open to the less calculable and controllable
element of foreign competition, and the fact that the earlier stages of
concentration of capital are not yet completed here in most trades, have
hitherto retarded the growth of the successful Trust in England. Even in
America there is no case where the monopoly of a Trust reigns absolute
through the whole country, though