ost of production and
distribution may be interesting. Complicated machinery can never be used
in producing upon a small scale, just as a small farmer can never afford
the use of a harvester. All the benefits of invention applied to machinery
have come through its use on a large scale. A factory making a thousand
pairs of shoes each year cannot use such machinery as the one making a
million pairs will need. Each one of the million pairs, therefore, costs
the world less than each one of the thousand pairs. Again the large
establishment, like an immense saw mill, being obliged to care for its
sawdust, may devise a way of making this waste product of use in pressed
blocks for kindling, or possibly in buttons or wood ornaments. The waste
of the shoe shop is only a nuisance, but the waste of a great shoe factory
is ground and pressed into all sorts of useful forms. All such saving of
waste is so much added to the world's store of wealth.

That the large establishment saves unnecessary friction is shown in the
order of any great mercantile establishment. It is still more noticeable
in immense iron works separated from every other form of industry for the
sake of freedom of motion. In these ways, principally, there is a saving
of labor in the huge department stores, although the facilities for
advertising, advantages for transportation in large bulk and the
employment of expert salesmen in every department contribute to the same
result. The general expenses of an ordinary store are estimated at nearly
40 per cent of the difference between wholesale and retail prices. The
same expenses in the great cooeperative store at Paris, the Bon Marche, are
only 14 per cent. While the controllers of capital in the large
enterprises have the first advantage of such saving, the very necessities
of their business compel a sharing with their employes and with the
public.

Even the so-called trusts, supposed to be contrivances for controlling the
market, have really served in many instances the welfare of the whole
community. A biscuit trust, in handling the most of the crackers in the
market, saves great expense of advertising, a still greater expense in
sales by traveling salesmen, or drummers, and immense waste of stock on
hand through condensation into fewer warehouses, reduces its insurance to
actual cost, and has brought to the public by means of all these savings a
greater variety of crackers of almost uniform quality suited to the
flu