that the chief object of this whole work of industrial organization was to diminish the hazards of unregulated competition and to subject large business operations to effective control.  A conspicuous instance of the effect of such interests and motives may be seen in the lease of the ore lands belonging to the Great Northern Railroad to the United States Steel Corporation.  The railroad company owned the largest body of good ore in the country outside of the control of the Steel Corporation, and if these lands had been leased to many small companies, the ability of the independent steel manufacturers to compete with the big steel company would have been very much increased.  But the Great Northern Railroad Company found it simpler and more secure to do business with one large than a number of small companies; and in this way the Steel Corporation has obtained almost a monopoly of the raw material most necessary to the production of finished steel.  It will be understood, consequently, how inevitably these big corporations strengthen one another’s hands; and it must be added that they had political as well as economic motives for so doing.  Although the big fellows sometimes indulge in the luxury of fierce fighting, such fights are always the prelude to still closer agreements.  They are all embarked in the same boat; and surrounded as they are by an increasing amount of enmity, provoked by their aggrandizement, they have every reason to lend one another constant and effective support.

There may be discerned in this peculiar organization of American industry an entangling alliance between a wholesome and a baleful tendency.  The purpose which prompted men like John D. Rockefeller to escape from the savage warfare in which so many American business men were engaged, was in itself a justifiable and ameliorating purpose.  Competition in American business was insufficiently moderated either by the state or by the prevailing temper of American life.  No sensible and resourceful man will submit to such a precarious existence without making some attempt to escape from it; and if the means which Mr. Rockefeller and others took to secure themselves served to make the business lives of their competitors still more precarious, such a result was only the expiation which American business men were obliged to pay for their own excesses.  The concentrated leadership, the partial control, the thorough organization thereby effected, was not necessarily a bad thing.  It was in some respects a decidedly good thing, because leadership of any kind has certain intrinsic advantages.  The trusts have certainly succeeded in reducing the amount of waste which was necessitated by the earlier condition of wholly unregulated competition.  The competitive methods of nature have been, and still are, within limits indispensable; but the whole effort of civilization has been to reduce the area within which they are desirably effective; and it is entirely possible that in the end the American system of industrial