Principles of western civilisation

422 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

they have failed because they have not been able to strike at trusts without at the same time striking at something which is inherent in the competitive process as it now exists, namely, the ‘Great Industry,’ in private hands. For the combinations of capital in trusts represent, in effect, but the phenomenon of the drawing together of the outstanding rivals in the competitive struggle to prevent the mutual exhaustion, waste, and effort of the final stages of the competitive conflict. But, if the struggle had continued to the end, the last phase in any case must have been the Great Industry. And all the laws against trusts betray the fatal weakness, says Mr. Forrest, that none of them have been able to strike directly at this, the main fact. The Great Industry is, in short, a result so closely interwoven with the meaning of the competitive process as it has hitherto existed in the English-speaking world that, as Mr. Forrest points out, even if legislative action had ventured to attack it, ‘‘constitutional limitations, so far, would render the law void.”

As, however, the development has rapidly proceeded, features of the situation, at first in the background, have come at last to present themselves vividly to the general imagination. The combination and concentration of capital engaged in the same business, and then in businesses nearly allied, has proceeded apace until the total of the wealth represented has altogether exceeded anything imagined in the earlier phases of the competitive era. Combinations in the United States, in which a capital of fifty millions of dollars was at first considered to be an enormous sum, have been

1 Am. Jour. Sociology, vol. v. 2, ‘* The Control of Trusts.”

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