ed. The sweated trades are a familiar
example of the former method of concentration. It has been shown over
and over again that while small establishments remain a necessary
condition of sweated industry, there is almost always effective
concentration of control. To all appearances an independent manufacturer
on a small scale, the sweater is generally nothing more than the agent
of some big establishment, which finds it more economical to let the
work be done in sweatshops than in its own factories. The same thing
holds good of the retail trades, many of the apparently independent
retail stores being simply agencies for big wholesale houses, controlled
by them in every way. In an even larger measure, agriculture is subject
to a control that is quite independent of actual or even nominal
ownership of the farm. Manifestly, therefore, we need a more accurate
and comprehensive definition of concentration than the one generally
accepted. Mr. A. M. Simons, in an admirable study of the agricultural
question from the Socialist viewpoint, defines concentration as "a
movement tending to give a continually diminishing minority of the
persons engaged in any industry, a constantly increasing control over
the essentials, and a continually increasing share of the total value of
the returns of the industry."[105] It is no part of the purpose of this
chapter to discuss this definition at length. It is sufficient to have
thus emphasized that concentration may be quite as effective when it is
limited to control as when it embraces ownership.

There are, then, other forms of concentration than the physical one, the
amalgamation of smaller units to form larger ones, and very often these
forms of concentration go on unperceived and unsuspected. There can be
no doubt that this is especially true of agricultural industry. Many
branches of farming, as the industry was carried on by our fathers and
their fathers before them, have been transferred from the farmhouse to
the factory. Butter and cheese making, for example, have largely passed
out of the farm kitchen into the factory. The writer recalls a visit to
a large farm in the Middle West. The sound of a churn is never heard
there, notwithstanding that it is a "dairy farm," and all the butter
and cheese consumed in that household is bought at the village store.
Doubtless this farm but presented an exaggerated form of a condition
that is becoming more and more common. The invention of labor-savi