conditions, with more individual dignity and freedom, but it
would be at the price of general poverty and the arrest of
material progress.

"Was there, then, no way of commanding the services of the
mighty wealth-producing principle of consolidated capital without
bowing down to a plutocracy like that of Carthage? As soon
as men began to ask themselves these questions, they found the
answer ready for them. The movement toward the conduct of
business by larger and larger aggregations of capital, the
tendency toward monopolies, which had been so desperately and
vainly resisted, was recognized at last, in its true significance, as a
process which only needed to complete its logical evolution to
open a golden future to humanity.

"Early in the last century the evolution was completed by the
final consolidation of the entire capital of the nation. The
industry and commerce of the country, ceasing to be conducted
by a set of irresponsible corporations and syndicates of private
persons at their caprice and for their profit, were intrusted to a
single syndicate representing the people, to be conducted in the
common interest for the common profit. The nation, that is to
say, organized as the one great business corporation in which all
other corporations were absorbed; it became the one capitalist in
the place of all other capitalists, the sole employer, the final
monopoly in which all previous and lesser monopolies were
swallowed up, a monopoly in the profits and economies of which
all citizens shared. The epoch of trusts had ended in The Great
Trust. In a word, the people of the United States concluded to
assume the conduct of their own business, just as one hundred