wing ones among his
rivals in the march of improvement, whether it comes by improved tools
of trade or improved generalship in the handling of men and tools.
Quite as remorseless as the law of survival of good technical methods
is the law of survival of efficient organization, and so long as the
organization is limited to the forces under the control of single and
competing _entrepreneurs_, what we have said about the advance in
methods applies to it. It is a beneficent process for society, though
its future scope is more restricted than is that of technical
improvement, since the marshaling of forces in an establishment may be
carried so near to perfection that there is a limit on further gains.
Moreover organization, in the end, ceases to confine itself to the
working forces of single _entrepreneurs_, but often continues till it
brings rival producers into a union.

_The Extension of Organization to Entire Subgroups._--Both of these
modes of progress cause establishments to grow larger, and the
ultimate effect of this is to give over the market for goods of any
one kind to a few establishments which are enormously large and on
something like a uniform plane of efficiency. Then the organizing
tendency takes a baleful cast as the creator of "trusts" and the
extinguisher of rivalries that have insured progress.

When monster-like corporations once start a competitive strife with
each other, it is very fierce and very costly for themselves; and this
affords an inducement for taking that final step in organization which
brings competition to an end. That is organization of a different
kind, and the effects of it are very unlike those of the cooerdinating
process which goes on within the several establishments. In this, its
final stage, the organizing tendency brings a whole subgroup into
union, and undoes much of the good it accomplished in its earlier
stage, when it was perfecting the individual establishments within the
subgroup. While the earlier process makes the supply of goods of a
certain kind larger and cheaper, the final one makes it smaller and
dearer; and while the earlier process scatters benefits among
consumers, the final one imposes a tax on consumers in the shape of
higher prices for merchandise. Yet the union that is formed between
the shops is, in a way, the natural sequel to the preliminary
organization which took place within them and helped to make them few
and large. Trusts are a product of economic