shape great publishing trusts and
associations that will have the same relation to the publishing office
of to-day that a medical association has to a patent-medicine dealer.
They will not only publish, but sell; their efficient book-shops, their
efficient system of book-distribution will replace the present haphazard
dealings of quite illiterate persons under whose shadows people in the
provinces live.[48] If one of these publishing groups decides that a
book, new or old, is of value to the public mind, I conceive the
copyright will be secured and the book produced all over the world in
every variety of form and price that seems necessary to its exhaustive
sale. Moreover, these publishing associations will sustain spaciously
conceived organs of opinion and criticism, which will begin by being
patiently and persistently good, and so develop into power. And the more
distinctly the New Republic emerges, the less danger there will be of
these associations being allowed to outlive their service in a state of
ossified authority. New groups of men and new phases of thought will
organize their publishing associations as children learn to talk.[49]

And while the New Republic is thus developing its idea of itself and
organizing its mind, it will also be growing out of the confused and
intricate businesses and undertakings and public services of the present
time, into a recognizable material body. The synthetic process that is
going on in the case of many of the larger of the businesses of the
world, that formation of Trusts that bulks so large in American
discussion, is of the utmost significance in this connection.
Conceivably the first impulse to form Trusts came from a mere desire to
control competition and economize working expenses, but even in its very
first stages this process of coalescence has passed out of the region of
commercial operations into that of public affairs. The Trust develops
into the organization under men far more capable than any sort of public
officials, of entire industries, of entire departments of public life,
quite outside the ostensible democratic government system altogether.
The whole apparatus of communications, which we have seen to be of such
primary importance in the making of the future, promises to pass, in the
case of the United States at least, out of the region of scramble into
the domain of deliberate control. Even to-day the Trusts are taking over
quite consciously the most vital nat