roduction. In
order to attain this object it is not necessary that the Trust shall
comprise all the capital engaged in an industry. Even when the
Standard Oil Trust was firmly established, and was, according to its
own admission, paying 12-1/2 or 13 per cent. on its highly-watered
stock, there appears to have existed no fewer than 111 smaller
independent companies competing with it directly or indirectly at some
point within the area of its market.[134] But the Standard Oil Trust
was able to control prices, as the producer of some 75 per cent. of
the total product, and the practical monopolist over the main area of
its market. Similarly the Sugar Refineries Trust in 1888 had a firm
grip over prices by its possession of 80 per cent. of the sugar
refining capacity of the Atlantic Coast, or 65 per cent. of the sugar
consumed in the United States.[135] There are other cases where a
formally constructed Trust is for a time engaged in close effective
competition, either with another Trust, as was the position of the
Standard Oil Trust over a portion of its markets in the period 1881 to
1884, or with powerful companies not organised as Trusts. This is what
Mr. Gunton appears to consider the normal condition of a Trust, one in
which competition takes place between a few large bodies of capital
instead of between many smaller bodies.[136] Certain Trusts have
certainly been compelled to struggle for the retention of their
monopoly power over the market. A notorious example is that of the
Sugar Trust, which, after a most successful start in 1888, found
itself in 1890 face to face with a new and formidable competitor in
the shape of the Claus Spreckles refineries of Philadelphia and San
Francisco, and was compelled to forego the high profits it had been
making and fight for its existence under terms of keenest competition.

But in so far as a Trust stands in this position it has failed to
achieve its industrial end of checking "ruinous competition" and the
"cutting of prices." It is not in the possession of the chief
economies of a Trust so long as it remains at warfare, for it is
compelled to expend all that it gains from the enlarged scale of
business and from the cessation of competition among its constituent
companies upon the strife with its single antagonist. A Trust in this
inchoate condition has no special economic character distinguishing it
from other large aggregates of competing capital. It is with
fully-formed trusts