or the stronger competitors.

So long as the increased size of business brings with it a net
economic advantage, the competition of ever larger competitors, whose
total power of production is far ahead of sales at remunerative
prices, and who are therefore constrained to devote an increased
proportion of energy to taking one another's trade, must intensify
this cut-throat warfare. The diminishing number of competitors in a
market does not ease matters in the least, for the intensity of the
strife reaches its maximum when two competing businesses are fighting
a life or death struggle. As the effective competitors grow fewer, not
only is the proportion of attention each devotes to the other more
continuous and more highly concentrated, but the results of success
are more intrinsically valuable, for the reward of victory over the
last competitor is the attainment of monopoly.

Sec. 4. To keen-eyed business men engaged in the thick of large-scale
competition it becomes increasingly clear that good profits can only
be obtained in one of two ways. A successful firm must either be in
possession of some trade secret, patent, special market, or such other
private economy as places it in a position of monopoly in certain
places or in certain lines of goods, or else it must make some
arrangement with competing firms whereby they shall consent to abate
the intensity or limit the scope of their competition. It will
commonly be found that both these conditions are present where a
modern firm of manufacturers or merchants succeeds in maintaining
during a long period of time a prosperous or paying business. The
firm, though in close competition over part of the field of industry,
will have a speciality of a certain class of wares, at any rate in
certain markets, and it will be fortified by a more or less firmly
fixed rate of prices extending over the whole class of commodities.
Both of these forces signify a restriction upon competition.

To the older economists, who regarded free competition as the only
safe guarantee of industrial security and progress, it appeared
natural that capitalists continually engaged in the maximum
competition would yet secure a living rate of profit, for if this were
not the case, they ingenuously urged, capital would cease to remain in
such a trade. With the fallacy involved in this theory we shall deal
in a later chapter. It is sufficient here to observe that where keen
competition is operative in mode