advantages of large capital over small are able to assert themselves more and more effectively.  In certain branches of trade, which have not yet been taken over by elaborate machinery, or where everything depends upon the personal activity and intelligence, and the detailed supervision of a fully interested owner, the small capitalist may still hold his own, as in certain branches of retail trade.  But the general movement is in favour of large businesses.  Everywhere the big business is swallowing up the smaller, and in its turn is liable to be swallowed by a bigger one.  In manufacture, where the cosmopolitan character is strongest, and where machinery plays so large a part, the movement towards vast businesses is most marked; each year makes it more rapid, and more general.  But in wholesale and retail distribution, though somewhat slower, the tendency is the same.  Even in agriculture, where close personal care and the limitations of a local market temper the larger tendency, the recent annals of Western America and Australia supply startling evidence of the concentrative force of machinery.  The meaning of this movement in capital must not be mistaken.  It is not merely that among competing businesses, the larger showing themselves the stronger survive, and the smaller, out-competed disappear.  This of course often happens.  The big screw-manufacturer able to provide some new labour-saving machinery, to advertise more effectively, or even to sell at a loss for a period of time, can drown his weaker competitors and take their trade.  The small tradesman can no longer hold his own in the fight with the universal provider, or the co-operative store.

But this destruction of the small business, though an essential factor in the movement, is not perhaps the most important aspect.  The industrial superiority of the large business over the small makes for the concentration both of small capitals and of business ability.  The monster millionaire, who owns the whole or the bulk of his great business, is after all a very rare specimen.  The typical business form of to-day is the joint stock company.  This simply means that a number of capitalists, who might otherwise have been competing with one another on a small scale of business, recognizing the advantage of size, agree to mass their capital into one large lump, and to entrust its manipulation to the best business ability they can muster among them, or procure from outside.  This process in its simplest form is seen in the amalgamation of existing and competing businesses, notable examples of which have recently occurred in the London publishing trade.  But the ordinary Company, whether it grows by the expansion of some large existent business, or, like most railways or other new enterprises, is formed out of money subscribed in order to form a business, represents the same concentrating tendency.  These share-owners put their capital together into one concern, in order to reap some advantage