assume that terrible offences are being perpetrated; whereas
nothing is being done which in England would not receive the approval of
the majority of sensible men and be temperately applauded by the
spokesmen of both the great parties in Parliament. It is not, I say
again, the Trust-power, but the hatred of it, which is peculiar to
America.

The same is true of the field as a whole. Things harmless in England
might be very dangerous in America. We have so far considered the trust
power only as a commercial and industrial factor--in its tendency, by
crystallisation or consolidation in the higher strata, to depress the
economic status of the industrial masses and to make the emergence of
the individual trader into independence more difficult. In this aspect
capital is immensely more dominant in England than in America. But there
is a political side to the problem.

In the United States, owing to the absence of a throne and an
established aristocracy, there is, as it were, no counterpoise to the
power of wealth. This is, in practice, the chief virtue of the throne in
the British constitution, that, in its capacity as the Fountain of
Honour, it prevents wealth from becoming the dominant power in the
country and thereby (which Americans are slow to understand) is the most
democratic of forces, protecting the proletariat in some measure against
the possibility of unhindered oppression by an omnipotent capitalism.
The English masses are already by the mere impenetrability of the
commercial structure above them much worse off than the corresponding
masses in the United States. What their condition might be if for a
generation the social restraint put upon wealth by the power of the
throne and the established aristocracy were to be relaxed, it is not
pleasant to consider. Nor need it be considered.[335:1]

It is, I think, evident that in America the danger to the industrial
independence of the individual which might arise from the aggregation of
wealth in a few hands is much greater than in England. The power would
be capable of greater abuse; the evils which would flow from such abuse
would be greater. It is not wealth, but the abuse of it that he is
attacking, says President Roosevelt--not the wealthy class, but the
"wealthy criminal class." The distinction has not been digested by those
in England who rail against American methods or who write of American
politics. It is necessary--or so it seems to a large number of the