omes which in England would class them among the reasonably rich.

Consolidation and amalgamation are the necessary and unavoidable
tendencies of modern business. As surely as the primitive partnership
succeeded individual effort and as, later, corporations were created to
enlarge the sphere of partnerships, so is it certain that the industrial
units which will fight for control of trade in the much larger markets
of the modern world will represent vastly larger aggregations of capital
than (except in extraordinary and generally state-aided institutions)
were dreamed of fifty years ago. That must be accepted as a certainty.
It does not by any means necessarily follow that this process entails a
concentration of wealth in fewer hands; on the contrary the larger a
corporation is, the wider proportionally, as a general rule, is the
circle of the shareholders in whom the property is vested. But
presuming the commercial growth of the United States to continue for
half a century yet on the lines on which it has developed in the last
two decades, the country will then, not so much by any concentration of
wealth, but by the mere filling up of the commercial field (so that by
increase in the intensity of competition the opportunity for the small
or new trader to force his way to the surface will be more curtailed,
and the gulf between owner or employer and non-owner or employed will
become greater and more permanent)--if, I say, that growth should
continue for another fifty years then will the conditions in America
approximate to those in England. This it is against which the masses in
America are more or less blindly and unconsciously fighting to-day. The
comparison with European conditions is generally not formulated in the
individual mind; but an approach to those conditions is what the masses
of America see--or think they see--in the tendency towards greater
aggregations of corporate power. It is not the process of aggregation,
but the protest against it, which is peculiar to the United States: not
the trust-power but the hatred of it.

This being so, for Englishmen or other Europeans to speak of all
manifestations of the process itself as "American" is not a little
absurd. Besides which, to so speak of it in the tone which is generally
adopted is extremely impolite to a kindred people whose good-will
Englishmen ought to, and do, desire to keep.

The thing is best illustrated by taking a single example. The term
"Trust" is