well as in any other business. Checks upon increased price come as
certainly from substitutes as from rival production, and the ability of
the people will always gauge the amount of sales. The expression "What the
trade will bear," means a price such as not to diminish consumption.
Indeed, the business principles of a great trust are essentially the same
as those in any single manufactory. A trust which stops the work of
certain factories in a combination for the sake of diminishing the output,
because of danger to prices from too rapid production, follows the same
principle as a farmer who stops raising wheat from the probability of too
much wheat in the market. The farmer would better lose the use of his land
for a time than lose the advantage of both land and labor by
over-production of wheat. In the same way a trust may wisely hold its
fixed capital unproductive till the consumption of the community reaches
the full extent of its power to produce. The power of one combination to
interfere with the workings of another by indirect methods, like
investment in the other's stock, is an evil to be treated like any fraud.
Laws and courts are in the power of the people, and should preserve the
rights of all.

One great danger of large combinations is the tendency to govern by iron
rule instead of by fair judgment of individual cases. This is a difficulty
always connected with great enterprises, to be cured as growth advances
through establishing well trained experts whose judgment makes the rules
not only good in themselves, but well executed. The government itself is
subject to the same difficulty, as seen in the handling of an army, and is
obliged to meet it in the same way. Even the abuses often referred to from
enormous difference of wages between the executive officers and the
inferior operatives are quite possibly only a natural method for solving
these difficulties. A first-class officer has no difficulty with his men.
In general those institutions whose management is costly do better for
their workmen than the weaker institutions with weaker men at the head.

The supposed dangers from too rapid improvement in the machinery of
production are scarcely to be credited in the light of improvements during
the last hundred years. Every improvement has certainly given a larger
enjoyment and better employment to the masses of people. The enterprise
which invents better ways of accomplishing anything is the best possible
me