he American Revolution, for
the measure which precipitated hostilities was the effort of England to
impose her monopoly of the Eastern trade upon America. The Boston Tea
Party occurred on December 16, 1773. Then came the heyday of competition
with the acceptance of the theories of Adam Smith, and the political
domination in England, towards 1840, of the Manchester school of
political economy.

About forty years since, in America at least, the tide would appear once
more to have turned. I fix the moment of flux, as I am apt to do, by a
lawsuit. This suit was the Morris Run Coal Company _v._ Barclay Coal
Company,[5] which is the first modern anti-monopoly litigation that I
have met with in the United States. It was decided in Pennsylvania in
1871; and since 1871, while the area within which competition is
possible has been kept constant by the tariff, capital has accumulated
and has been concentrated and volatilized until, within this republic,
substantially all prices are fixed by a vast moneyed mass. This mass,
obeying what amounts to being a single volition, has its heart in Wall
Street, and pervades every corner of the Union. No matter what price is
in question, whether it be the price of meat, or coal, or cotton cloth,
or of railway transportation, or of insurance, or of discounts, the
inquirer will find the price to be, in essence, a monopoly or fixed
price; and if he will follow his investigation to the end, he will also
find that the first cause in the complex chain of cause and effect which
created the monopoly in that mysterious energy which is enthroned on the
Hudson.

The presence of monopolistic prices in trade is not always a result of
conscious agreement; more frequently, perhaps, it is automatic, and is
an effect of the concentration of capital in a point where competition
ceases, as when all the capital engaged in a trade belongs to a single
owner. Supposing ownership to be enough restricted, combination is
easier and more profitable than competition; therefore combination,
conscious or unconscious, supplants competition. The inference from the
evidence is that, in the United States, capital has reached, or is
rapidly reaching, this point of concentration; and if this be true,
competition cannot be enforced by legislation. But, assuming that
competition could still be enforced by law, the only effect would be to
make the mass of capital more homogeneous by eliminating still further
such of the weaker ca