itions, things must be done in
a large way if they are to be done profitably; and this necessitates a
resort to combination.

The advantage which combination gives to the town over the country was
recognised long before the recent economic changes forced men to
combine. In the old towns of Europe all trades began as strict and
exclusive corporations. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries new
scientific and economic forces broke up these combinations, which were
far too narrow for the growing volume of industrial activity, and an
epoch of competition began. The great towns of America opened their
business career during this epoch, and have brought the arts of
competition to a higher perfection than exists in Europe. But it has
always been known that competition did not exclude combination against
the consumer; and it is now beginning to be perceived that the fiercer
the competition, the more surely does it lead in the end to such
combination.

A trade combination has three principal objects: it aims, first, at
improving what I may call the internal business methods of the trade
itself by eliminating the waste due to competition, by economising
staff, plant, etc., and by the ready circulation of intelligence, and in
other ways. In the second place, it aims at strengthening the trade
against outside interests. These may be of various kinds; but in the
typical case we are considering, namely, the combination of great
middlemen who control exchange and distribution, the outside interests
are those of the producer on one side and the consumer on the other; and
the trade combination, by its organised unity of action, succeeds in
lowering the prices it pays to the unorganised producer and in raising
the prices it charges to the unorganised consumer. In the third place,
the trade combination seeks to favour its own interests in their
relation to other interests through political control--control not so
much of the machinery of politics as of its products, legislation and
administration. I am not now arguing the question whether or how far
this action on the part of trade combinations is morally justifiable. My
point is simply that the towns have flourished at the expense of the
country by the use of these methods, and that the countryman must adopt
them if he is to get his own again. Moreover, as organisation tends to
increase the volume and lower the cost of agricultural production and to
make possible large transactions