mittent employment, with seasons of idleness, will be removed. Thus, while a fewer number of men may be employed, the aggregate days of employment, or the aggregate amount of labor employed, will be greater. There are those, however, who contend and not without good authority, that the consolidation, by reducing the price, will ultimately increase the consumption, and thereby in time will actually employ an even greater number of men. On the whole, with or without consolidation, no more labor will be employed than is necessary to supply the goods for which there is demand. Under the one system, the supply is not so well regulated to the demand, as under the other; hence recur seasons of shut-down and idleness. The consolidation prevents this; hence it must be of advantage to the laborer. The history of the Standard Oil Company is an excellent illustration of this principle. In no other industry employing so large a number of men has the working man had so continuous employment or better wages for the kind of work performed.

The officers of the great labor organizations of this country, in their papers read before this convention, have almost to a unit borne witness to the truth of the above assertions, and they all speak from experience when they favor industrial combinations. These views are entertained by some of the best thinkers and writers on political economy. Gunton says:

"If it is true that the concentration of capital tends to diminish the cost of production and intensify competition, it follows that prices will fall or wages will rise, or both, in proportion as large enterprises supplant small ones. And this is what all industrial history shows has taken place. Take for example the cotton industry in this country. In 1831 there were 801 cotton manufacturing establishments with an average capital of $50,702 each.

$ The ratio of consumption of cotton cloth to population was 5.90 pounds to 1, and the price of cotton cloth 17 cents per yard. In 1880 the number of establishments had fallen to 756. The average amount of capital invested in establishments had risen from $50,702 to $275,403; *** the ratio of consumption of cotton cloth to the population was 13.90 pounds to 1; and the price of cotton cloth was 7 cents per yard, and wages were 80 per cent higher. It will thus be seen that, comparing 1880 with 1831, the capital invested per spindle was over onethird less, the number of spindles operated by each laborer nearly three times as large, the product per spindle one-fourth greater, the product per dollar invested twice as large, the product per laborer employed nearly four times as great, the price of cotton cloth 60 per cent less, wages 80 per cent higher, and the con

sumption of cotton cloth per capita of the population over 100 per cent greater. These are the results of the process of consolidation into large capitals, extending over half a century. What is true of this industry is equally true of all industries in proportion as the concentration of capital has increased."

Those who cry loudest for legislation point to certain evils, charged as incident to consolidations, and demand prevention by law. For example, the watering of stock, the practice of reducing prices for the express purpose of crushing a rival, and then raising prices to an unreasonable amount, the circulation of false or misleading reports by the officers of such associations, for the purpose of stock speculations, and the corrupting of legislatures and municipal bodies.

These evils are not essential incidents to consolidations, they apply equally to all corporations. If it be thought that these practices can be stopped by legislation, then such wise and temperate legislation as will best prevent such practices might well be passed; but will legislation accomplish this? I am not one of those who think that you can legislate morality into a community. Laws receive their impulses from the people. The impulses move upward from the people to the law, and not downward from the law to the people. Like a pyramid, the people are the base, the law the apex; the pyramid will not stand inverted, nor will the apex stand without its base. For these immoral and dishonest practices we must look behind the statute books, behind the courts, behind the doors of the counting-house—we must look into the consciences of men. The corporation is only a cloak covering the men on whom it rests. But in these times, concealed by this covering, sometimes called a legal entity, corporate officers, as well as the community, have established a code of morals different from that by which individuals are governed in their personal transactions. Men will do through the corporation, or against the corporation, what they would shrink from doing in a personal transaction. This false moral idea is not limited to the man in the corporation; the man outside of the corporation is equally guilty. Claims against corporations, or demands upon them, are made that would never be made upon an individual. This is due to a depraved and diseased moral sentiment of the community. It is a false standard of morality. The corporation is no thing apart from the stockholders. It is a society of men. An aggregation of men. The officers who manage its affairs, the shareholders who own its stock, are the same men who sit by you at the club or in the church. Why shall they be held to one code of moral responsibility in their personal conduct and to another

code in their conduct as officers or shareholders of a corporation? We see the same men, and the same acts, but when done by the corporation, through its officer, there seems to be a kind of moral strabismus in the eye of the community, which looks over the evil doer to the thing done, and sees only the impersonal agent, the corporation, through which the evil was done. We are confronted by the same conditions in politics. It is the men of the community who are the corporation, the men of the community who manage the corporation. But because of the diseased moral sense of the community, those guilty of wrong doing as officers, or as stockholders of corporations, are not visited with the condemnation of their associates. The moralist and the ethical teacher must deal with this problem. Visit upon the offender the reprobation of the community for misdeeds against a corporation, as against an individual; for misdeeds as the officer or director of a corporation, just as for his acts as an individual, and if the moral sense of the community is high, just so high and no higher will rise the conduct of those dealing with or for corporations.

These same suggestions apply with even greater force to the charge that these large aggregations of capital tend to debauch politics by bribing legislatures and municipal governments. This charge presupposes for each corporation that succeeds in bribing, a large number of persons so corrupt that they will accept bribes. It assumes that legislatures and municipal bodies can be bribed. If this be true, and alas, there is not wanting much evidence that gives credibility to the imputation, the remedy surely would not be to suppress the corporation, any more than to suppress the legislature. The true remedy is to suppress the bribe taker, as well as the bribe giver. This can only be done by improving the moral tone of the community, because, after all, the legislatures, the municipal councils, aye, the corporations of a community, rise no higher and sink no lower in their moral tone than the general moral tone of their respective communities. This may seem an unsavory truth in this day of recriminations, but it is still a truth.

The capital employed in the enterprises of to-day may seem. large when compared with the amount thus employed at one time, but it is no larger in proportion than are the transactions of this age compared with those of former ages. Once all trade was circumscribed, confined within small territorial areas, due to lack of facilities for transportation and communication. The market places of cities and towns in the past were the sole marts sometimes of whole counties, or even larger districts. To-day what is

the situation? The price of a loaf of bread in Chicago is affected by a rumor of war in Asia, and the world's exchange goes up or down in accordance with the result of negotiations for a loan in Japan. Everything of importance occurring in the most remote portions of the world affects trade for good or evil in every other portion. Rumors of war or peace, the discovery of mineral deposits, a new and useful invention in any part of the world, reacts upon every other part. The whole world is every man's market. Transactions involving sums equal to a king's ransom are now of almost daily occurrence, and millions are now exchanged where hundreds once sufficed. Contracts for the supply of material involving tens of millions of dollars are not infrequent. The amount of capital employed in any enterprise signifies nothing except the magnitude of our dealings. These enormous amounts are not limited to companies formed by consolidation; they are likewise employed in business enterprise increased from small beginnings, by natural accretions, to keep step with the industrial progress and demands of the time.

The unification of the world into a single market place has come to pass through no human design, but as the natural result of improved facilities in transportation and communication. A man to-day in any part of the world may be in daily touch with his business, however remote; and with the markets in every other portion of the globe. These changed conditions have caused like changes in methods of business. Trade and commerce never lag behind the train of progress and improvement; they keep apace, sometimes they are in the van. Those who would prevent these vast aggregations of capital, would turn back the hands on the dial of civilization. They would seek to prevent the natural, inevitable tendency which has been superinduced by the exigencies of trade, and made imperative by the complex and complicated commerce of the world. Consolidations in industrial enterprises, large aggregations of capital, are not sudden creations, they are growths, forced upon the world by the law of progress. They are here by no man's fiat; they can be driven away by no human agency. They are natural-inevitable-necessary.

Consolidation is the protest of capital against extinction. Consolidations were formed in self-defense. They grew up by force of competition, to avoid destruction by competition. If the smaller and weaker had not combined to battle with the larger and stronger, they were doomed to annihilation. As the individual enterprise, whether partnership or corporate, grew and prospered, and added to its strength and power, appropriating more and more of a given trade, the trade of smaller concerns was

thereby contracted, and if consolidation or combination had been denied, they would have been eliminated by the more powerful rival. By combination they at one step placed themselves in position to compete and to hold their own. To many concerns it was a choice between consolidation and insolvency. To many a proprietor it was a choice between losing all, going out of business, or remaining in business as a stockholder in the larger company, and saving his accumulations. Through consolidations and the consequent large stock issues, the public are given opportunity to become stockholders, and thus share in the profits and industries which formerly were closed to general investment. The successful manufacturer enlarged and increased his plant, but the ownership generally remained a family affair. Many of the multimillionaires of this country thus accumulated their wealth. There is no reason why skilled laborers receiving good wages, as well as others connected with the business, should not become sharers in the profits they help to carn, by acquiring an interest in the business in this way.

I come from Pittsburgh, a city where sit enthroned old King Coal and new King Steel. Consolidations have been effected in that section in almost every line of industry. Smoke is issuing from every stack, fires are burning in every furnace. Labor was never so well paid nor so much employed. Trade was never so good, times so prosperous, nor the outlook so favorable. Have not consolidations and these vast aggregations of capital something to do with this? How otherwise could we have taken such stupendous contracts for the supply of iron and steel in Europe, Russia, China, Japan, Australia, Africa-in fact all over the world? What could the ordinary industrial concern do with a six million dollar order for a railway in Russia? The public never was so well served as now, never supplied with better goods nor a greater variety, never supplied so promptly and so efficiently.

Would those who decry consolidation have this growing, prosperous, industrial nation, with an inventive genius the greatest in the world, and an adaptability never before approached, lie down in the ruin of its industries and hand over its trade to other nations nations that are now madly striving for the same? Herr Krupp is not so far behind, nor other German manufacturers. England, with her gigantic industries (many the fruits of combination and consolidation, which she has never discouraged since she learned the errors of her ways), has not yet surrendered the marts of the world to her American competitor.

America has only recently been taught the lesson of the power for good of these great industrial plants. She is making good use