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