the city itself absorbed its smaller rivals
till the business of a whole quarter was concentrated under one roof,
with a hundred former proprietors of shops serving as clerks. Having no
business of his own to put his money in, the small capitalist, at the
same time that he took service under the corporation, found no other
investment for his money but its stocks and bonds, thus becoming doubly
dependent upon it.

"The fact that the desperate popular opposition to the consolidation of
business in a few powerful hands had no effect to check it proves that
there must have been a strong economical reason for it. The small
capitalists, with their innumerable petty concerns, had in fact yielded
the field to the great aggregations of capital, because they belonged
to a day of small things and were totally incompetent to the demands of
an age of steam and telegraphs and the gigantic scale of its
enterprises. To restore the former order of things, even if possible,
would have involved returning to the day of stagecoaches. Oppressive
and intolerable as was the regime of the great consolidations of
capital, even its victims, while they cursed it, were forced to admit
the prodigious increase of efficiency which had been imparted to the
national industries, the vast economies effected by concentration of
management and unity of organization, and to confess that since the new
system had taken the place of the old the wealth of the world had
increased at a rate before undreamed of. To be sure this vast increase
had gone chiefly to make the rich richer, increasing the gap between
them and the poor; but the fact remained that, as a means merely of
producing wealth, capital had been proved efficient in proportion to
its consolidation. The restoration of the old system with the
subdivision of capital, if it were possible, might indeed bring back a
greater equality of conditions, with more individual dignity and
freedom, but it would be at the price of general poverty and the arrest
of material progress.

"Was there, then, no way of commanding the services of the mighty
wealth-producing principle of consolidated capital without bowing down
to a plutocracy like that of Carthage? As soon as men began to ask
themselves these questions, they found the answer ready for them. The
movement toward the conduct of business by larger and larger
aggregations of capital, the tendency toward monopolies, which had been
so desperately and vainly resist