es to favored customers, and an
Expedition Law, to make the wheels of justice move more rapidly when
prosecutions under the Sherman and Interstate Commerce Laws were under
way.

Industrial consolidation, like that of the railways, began again in
1897, and many of the new corporations assumed a type that marked an
evolution for the trust. In the earlier period the aim of the trust had
been to eliminate competition by gathering under a single control the
whole of a given business. Oil, sugar, steel, whiskey, and tobacco were
notable instances in which extreme consolidation had been reached.
Competition changed its character as consolidation increased. It ceased
to mean a struggle between rivals in the same trade, and came to mean a
struggle between successive processes of manufacture. The mine-owner
struggled for his profits with the smelter who used his ore. The smelter
struggled with the steel manufacturer in the same way. Control of single
industries left untouched this newer competition, but an integration of
great groups of related processes promised to avoid it.

In 1901 the greatest of the integrated trusts, the United States Steel
Corporation, was created. The iron and steel industry had been expanding
since the Bessemer and other commercial processes for the manufacture of
steel had made it available for railway, bridge, and architectural
construction. Andrew Carnegie, with his Pittsburg mills, was the most
successful producer. His partnership controlled by 1901 about
twenty-five per cent of the output of finished steel. He already
included many related and successive processes, but now he allowed his
works to be merged with those of his rivals into a large company. The
resulting United States Steel Corporation owned and operated the ore
deposits and the mines, the necessary coal fields, the local railways
and freight steamers, the smelters and the blast furnaces, the rolling
mills and the factories in which iron and steel were manufactured into a
multitude of shapes for sale. With a New Jersey charter it was
capitalized at $1,100,000,000, and drew attention to the industrial
phase of the trust problem much as Harriman, Hill, and Morgan had drawn
it to the railroads.

Promotion of new trusts, with billions of aggregated capital, was the
order of the day from 1897 to 1902. The fear of monopoly was speedily
aroused, and in 1898 Congress created an Industrial Commission, whose
nineteen volumes of reports contain