the discarded machine, may be injured, but society as a whole will be benefited by such displacements.

Progress cannot be made without sacrifice. If no person or machine is to be displaced while they can render service the future can never know better conditions than we now have. The stage driver went out of employment when the stage was no longer useful. Stage drivers were injured and stage coaches were destroyed, but society as a whole, especially all that part of society that works for its living, has been enormously benefited by the change.

The sacrifices required by industrial organizations do not differ in character from the sacrifices required by the adoption of a more efficient machine, method or process of any kind, in any vocation. Such sacrifices are details of progress; they are not the results sought. They are like tearing down an old building to clear the ground for the construction of a better one. The tenant displaced may be greatly inconvenienced and injured, but the tenant of the new building may be as greatly served and benefited. It is certain if benefit was not expected as the net result of the change, the change would not be made. In this view of the subject it must be plainly seen that industrial organizations are designed to work out benefits for the people, and that those who denounce them as conceived in sin and born in iniquity are in error. They are made possible only by applying the gospel of good-will; their purpose is to accomplish good results. They cannot accomplish their

purpose without contributing to the general welfare. All the evils they do result from an abuse of power, just as all the vices and wrongs of which individuals are guilty result from an abuse of liberty. All evils, individual or corporate, exist because men are not true masters of liberty and power.

ON THE FORMATION OF TRUSTS.

The charter of the Federal Steel Company is a complete illustration of the difference in scope and power between a legal person-a corporation-and a natural person-you and me. This may cause our indignation to rise, but let us stop a bit and consider that the true function of the corporation is to afford you and me an opportunity to invest the small capital we have saved from our earnings in a way to secure a larger income from it than we can obtain by investing it in a savings bank deposit, or in any business we can do by the use of our own capital only. When this function is rightly performed a corporation may be composed of thousands of shareholders. Its great scope and powers are then not a menace but a guarantee of protection to industrial welfare. It gives to the thousands industrially combined no greater scope or power than the state freely gives to thousands of persons politically combined in the organization of municipalities. In each case the organization is effected to promote the welfare of its constituent elements, be they shareholders or citizens.

TRUST PRICES.

Under this heading, "The Outlook" for June 16, 1900, calls attention to the fact that the Ice Trust in New York was selling ice to consumers in different parts of the city at different prices on the same day. Of course there could be no bona fide economic reason for such differences in price. This action of the trust was simply a new application of the once famous railroad practice of charging what the traffic would bear. And "The Outlook" prescribes the old remedy for the evil saying, the "Trust" should be required by law to sell to all consumers at the same price when as easily reached. This is the same as saying to railroads that prices for transportation should be the same to all persons requiring service under like conditions. A very easy statement to make and a very difficult one to enforce because the conditions are never the same for any two patrons. The ice question is the simpler one and may be easily solved by making a uniform price for the whole city with a rebate for quantity delivered at one time or during the season. The question of price is the burning one in the ice problem, as it has been developed by the trust in New York.

DISSOLVING TRUSTS.

New concerns

Now the trust have formed the 1892 as they do

All theorists have to take their hats off to controverting facts. In 1892 a few sagacious practical business men sought to control the wall paper trade by forming a trust. They did not secure an act of Congress forbidding all others to keep out of the business. They established a uniform scale of prices, but found themselves unable to maintain it. Competition from outside concerns proved irresistible. started up and undersold the trust. managers are saying they would not trust if they had known as much in now. One thing they have learned is that they could not maintain prices high enough to enable them to pay a dividend on the $28,000,000 of common stock with which they sought to enrich themselves when they organized the trust. They might sell this stock for wall paper. It undoubtedly has finely engraved illustrations and no value as stock. A room papered with this stock would be worth more to an anti-trust campaign than many a learned treatise on "Trusts," but for the fact that the trust was abolished by a natural process, not by fiat legislation.

EMPLOYMENT AND TRUSTS.

The best vote-winning charge made against trusts is that of throwing large numbers of persons out of employment. The closing up of individual concerns. by the consolidation of business is always tangible evidence to a certain class of minds that trusts are monsters that must be annihilated or they will reduce workingmen to a condition of slavery. Under normal conditions there are always more or less failures among manufacturers and merchants, who are the principal employers of wage-earners. Every failure. throws some workers out of employment. It makes no difference, in one sense, to the wage-earner whether he is thrown out of employment by reason of the failure of his employer or because the employer has consolidated his business with others in a greater corporation. He suffers deprivation in either case. But in the long run, and to the country as a whole, it makes a tremendous difference which way the loss of employ

ment comes.

Failures destroy or disseminate capital, rendering it unable to carry on an industry in which wage-earners can be employed. Consolidations preserve capital and render it more effective in carrying on industries that must employ wage-earners. The prosperity of a growing business, although it is conducted by a great corporation, will absorb more labor than was displaced by the original consolidation. It is within the