Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I THE TRUST AND DEMOCRACY THE PLOT IN THE DRAMA OF HISTORY We are moving on in a grand evolution of a social and industrial order out of a semi-barbarian chaos. ? The Social Horizon. There is a phenomenon, first appearing in America, which in our generation has carried economic evolution to its highest pitch, and that is the Trust?than which no greater sign of coming events was ever vouchsafed to man. We all know what a trust in its general features is?it means, that the different establishments in a given line of business combine to stop competition between themselves and thus regulate production?that is, the supply. Now note the tremendous importance of this appar ently so simple matter. It is an admission by our captains of industry, that competition has now become highly injurious and is growing more and more unprofitable to their interests; it is a further admission, that competition involves planless production, and that plan- lessness here, as elsewhere, means waste and inefficiency. This admission it is, that has originated the Trust. But competition is the principle hitherto ruling in our present industrial system, and the Trust, then, is a complete break with and abandonment of that principle, and the substitution for it of its very opposite: combination or cooperation. It is this significant admission by business men of all classes, that competition is henceforth ruinous to them?however beneficent it may have proven in the past?that makes the attempts to crush the Trust entirely hopeless; that which has become the natural course for business and production is sure to break a path for itself through all obstructions. It is just as foolish in legislators to try to suppress the Trust as it would be for them to legislate against the winds or t…
