the great cotton and woolen mills of New England. Separate
proprietors, likewise, controlled the iron and steel factories of
New York State and Pennsylvania. Indeed it was not until the War
that corporations entered the iron industry, now regarded as the
field above all others adapted to this kind of organization. The
manufacture of sewing machines, firearms, and agricultural
implements started on a great scale in the Civil War; still, the
prevailing unit was the private owner or the partnership. In many
manufacturing lines, the joint stock company had become the
prevailing organization, but even in these fields the element
that so characterizes our own age, that of combination, was
exerting practically no influence.

Competition was the order of the day: the industrial warfare of
the sixties was a free-for-all. A mere reference to the status of
manufactures in which the trust is now the all-prevailing fact
will make the contrast clear. In 1865 thousands of independent
companies were drilling oil in Pennsylvania and there were more
than two hundred which were refining the product. Nearly four
hundred and fifty operators were mining coal, not even dimly
foreseeing the day when their business would become a great
railroad monopoly. The two hundred companies that were making
mowers and reapers, seventy-five of them located in New York
State, had formed no mental picture of the future International
Harvester Company. One of our first large industrial combinations
was that which in the early seventies absorbed the manufacturers
of salt; yet the close of the Civil War found fifty competing
companies making salt in the Saginaw Valley of Michigan. In the
same State, about fifty distinct ownerships controlled the copper
mines, while in Nevada the Comstock Lode had more than one