s the
prelude to still closer agreements. They are all embarked in the same
boat; and surrounded as they are by an increasing amount of enmity,
provoked by their aggrandizement, they have every reason to lend one
another constant and effective support.

There may be discerned in this peculiar organization of American
industry an entangling alliance between a wholesome and a baleful
tendency. The purpose which prompted men like John D. Rockefeller to
escape from the savage warfare in which so many American business men
were engaged, was in itself a justifiable and ameliorating purpose.
Competition in American business was insufficiently moderated either by
the state or by the prevailing temper of American life. No sensible and
resourceful man will submit to such a precarious existence without
making some attempt to escape from it; and if the means which Mr.
Rockefeller and others took to secure themselves served to make the
business lives of their competitors still more precarious, such a result
was only the expiation which American business men were obliged to pay
for their own excesses. The concentrated leadership, the partial
control, the thorough organization thereby effected, was not necessarily
a bad thing. It was in some respects a decidedly good thing, because
leadership of any kind has certain intrinsic advantages. The trusts have
certainly succeeded in reducing the amount of waste which was
necessitated by the earlier condition of wholly unregulated competition.
The competitive methods of nature have been, and still are, within
limits indispensable; but the whole effort of civilization has been to
reduce the area within which they are desirably effective; and it is
entirely possible that in the end the American system of industrial
organization will constitute a genuine advance in industrial economy.
Large corporations, which can afford the best machinery; which control
abundant capital, and which can plan with scrupulous economy all the
details of producing and selling an important product or service, are
actually able to reduce the cost of production to a minimum; and in the
cases of certain American corporations such results have actually been
achieved. The new organization of American industry has created an
economic mechanism which is capable of being wonderfully and
indefinitely serviceable to the American people.

On the other hand, its serviceability is much diminished by the special
opportunities it