THE LARGER SYNTHESIS
economise working expenses, but even in its very first stages this process of coalescence has passed out of the region of commercial operations into that of public affairs. The Trust develops into the organisation under men far more capable than any sort of public officials, of entire industries, of entire departments of public life, quite outside the ostensible democratic government system altogether. The whole apparatus of communications, which we have seen to be of such primary importance in the making of the future, promises to pass, in the case of the United States at least, out of the region of scramble into the domain of deliberate control. Even to-day the Trusts are taking over quite consciously the most vital national matters. The American iron and steel industries have been drawn together and developed in a manner that is a necessary preliminary to the capture of the empire of the seas. That end is declaredly within the vista of these operations, within their initial design. These things are not the work of dividend-hunting imbeciles, but of men who regard wealth as a convention, as a means to spacious material ends. There is an animated little paper published in Los Angeles in the interests of Mr. Wilshire, which bears upon its forefront the maxim, "Let the Nation own the Trusts." Well, under their mantle of property, the Trusts grow continually more elaborate and efficient machines of production and public service, while the formal nation chooses its bosses and buttons and reads its illustrated press. I must confess I do not see the negro and the poor Irishman and all the emigrant
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