Читать книгу Our Benevolent Feudalism - William J. Ghent - Страница 9

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The tendencies make not only for combination in specific trades, but for unification—for complete integration of all capital which is susceptible of organization. Capitalistic atoms of low valency—to use a term from chemistry,—such as those invested in some of the hand trades, custom and repairing and the like—may continue their course, but those of a high valency are sooner or later brought into association. From this fundamental grouping comes integration, the concentration of the material units which go to make up an aggregate. The lesser gravitates to the larger. It needs no modern Newton to proclaim that in finance, commerce, and industry, as in the physical world, all bodies attract one another in direct proportion to their mass. Distance provides a limitation, it is true, to the action of this law in the physical world; but less so in the economic world, for such is the perfection of our means of communication that they provide a more transmissible medium to capital than is the pervading ether to light and gravitation.

The separate trade trusts are not sufficient unto themselves, but move steadily toward unification. A glance at the directorates of the leading combinations shows many names repeated through a long list of varied industries. The combinations themselves reach out and acquire new interests, often distinct from their primary interests. In Pennsylvania coal is mined and railroads are operated by practically the same companies, and in Colorado and West Virginia nearly as complete an identity is discovered. The steel corporation owns coal lands, limestone quarries, railroads, and docks; it is allied with the great Atlantic shipping trust; it is related, not distantly, to the Standard Oil Company; and the beginnings of a public opinion trust are indicated, for already its chief magnate has acquired several newspapers and a prominent magazine. Bishop Potter’s prediction, it would seem, is in fair way of fulfilment. “We must fully realize,” he said to the Yale students last April, “the danger that mind as well as matter will be at some time in the future capitalized, and that the real thinking and planning for the many will be done by a mere handful.” Beet and cane sugar are soon to be joined, we read; paper and lumber, if not already wedded, are at least on excellent terms. Oil and gas on the one hand, coal and iron on the other, have a “common understanding,” and each of them holds morganatic relations with one or more of the railroads. All the great combinations recognize a growing community of interest; they tend more and more to a potential, if not an actual, coalescence; and in the face of popular agitation, legislative aggressiveness, or the formal demands of labor, they develop a unity of purpose and method. Their support is thrown, in general, to the same candidates for governors, senators, judges, and tax assessors. In brief, they tend to the formation of a state within a state, and their individual members to the creation of an industrial and political hierarchy.