public
may regard trusts or combinations with serene confidence."

Surely if this statement is true, we have little need for further
examination of this subject. We have now knowledge enough of our subject
to enable us to determine its truth or falsity. We have found in the
actual trusts that we have examined none which have shown signs of
succumbing to outside competition. More than this, however, we have seen
that it is possible for a trust to carry on business and deliver goods
to the consumer at much less cost than an independent manufacturer can.
And as surely as this law holds that production on the largest scale is
the cheapest production, so surely will the trust triumph over the
independent manufacturer wherever they come into competition. If the
trust were always content when its competitors were disposed of, to make
only the profits which it could secure by selling at such prices as the
independent manufacturers could afford, there would be less outcry
against it. But with the consumers wholly dependent upon it for
supplies, the prices are in the trust's hands; and the tendency is to
reap not only the profits due to its lessened cost of production, but
also all it can secure by raising the selling price without arousing too
much the enmity of the public.

Clearly the trust is at once a benefit and a curse. Can we by any means
secure the benefit which it gives of reduction in cost without placing
ourselves at the mercy of a monopoly? This is the question which must
occur to every thoughtful man. Before we can answer it, however, we must
examine the effects of competition and monopoly in other industries.

III.

MONOPOLIES OF MINERAL WEALTH.

It is a well known historical fact that the extraction of metals and
minerals from the earth has been more subject to monopoly than almost
any other business. It was, and in a large part of the civilized world
still is, esteemed a prerogative of the sovereign. Agricultural products
have always been gathered from a wide area; manufactures were formerly
the product of mean and scattered workshops; but in the working of a
rich mine, there was a constant income more princely than was to be
obtained from any other single source. Again, with all due respect to
the traditions of former generations, it seems to have been thought that
any thing to which no one else had a valid title belonged to the crown;
and as no one was able to assert any stronger claim to the owner