money but its stocks
and bonds, thus becoming doubly dependent upon it.

"The fact that the desperate popular opposition to the consolidation
of business in a few powerful hands had no effect to check it proves
that there must have been a strong economical reason for it. The small
capitalists, with their innumerable petty concerns, had in fact
yielded the field to the great aggregations of capital, because they
belonged to a day of small things and were totally incompetent to the
demands of an age of steam and telegraphs and the gigantic scale of
its enterprises. To restore the former order of things, even if
possible, would have involved returning to the day of stage-coaches.
Oppressive and intolerable as was the regime of the great
consolidations of capital, even its victims, while they cursed it,
were forced to admit the prodigious increase of efficiency which had
been imparted to the national industries, the vast economies effected
by concentration of management and unity of organization, and to
confess that since the new system had taken the place of the old the
wealth of the world had increased at a rate before undreamed of. To be
sure this vast increase had gone chiefly to make the rich richer,
increasing the gap between them and the poor; but the fact remained
that, as a means merely of producing wealth, capital had been proved
efficient in proportion to its consolidation. The restoration of the
old system with the subdivision of capital, if it were possible, might
indeed bring back a greater equality of conditions, with more
individual dignity and freedom, but it would be at the price of
general poverty and the arrest of material progress.

"Was there, then, no way of commanding the services of the mighty
wealth-producing principle of consolidated capital without bowing down
to a plutocracy like that of Carthage? As soon as men began to ask
themselves these questions, they found the answer ready for them. The
movement toward the conduct of business by larger and larger
aggregations of capital, the tendency toward monopolies, which had
been so desperately and vainly resisted, was recognized at last, in
its true significance, as a process which only needed to complete its
logical evolution to open a golden future to humanity.

"Early in the last century the evolution was completed by the final
consolidation of the entire capital of the nation. The industry and
commerce of the country, ceasing to be conducted