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superintendence of a single chemical expert, who is paid a salary of fifty thousand dollars a year to devise "wastesaving" contrivances, which, with the alleged consequent deterioration of the product, affords one an insight into a cardinal rule in the policy of the Trust.

Another combination, in importance perhaps next to the Sugar Trust, is that whose president is Mr. J. B. Duke, and which controls the tobacco commerce of America. In this case, although there are nominally two great companies, each with a capital of over eighty-five millions, in reality it is a single concern, with a common president and board of directors, and a common plan of offence and defence against competition. The origin of this important trust is due to Mr. Duke himself, who, in 1882, purchased, for less than £10,000, the controlling interest in a cigarette factory, established by his father in North Carolina. At that time the competition amongst the New York cigarette manufacturers was very strong; the sum of a million dollars annually spent upon advertising alone sufficing to consume the profits. Mr. Duke undertook to confer with the various leading manufacturers, with the result that these agreed to consolidate their interests; the success of this initial Trust leading to the present further amalgamation of the tobacco manufacturing interests.

Apart from the Trusts which deal in and affect the necessaries of life and the commodities of modern domestic use, there is the consolidation of interests in such appliances as the telegraph and telephone. The Telephone Trust, of which the late Mr. J. E. Hudson was the head, is a very thorough monopoly in the district it covers, and had its organizer lived a few months longer, its operations would have embraced a much wider field and been itself of such far greater magnitude as to cause the telephone system to be subordinate to the telegraph and cable interests.

The Trust system began in the conception of a single 'man; and the Trusts are really in the hands of a much smaller group of men to-day than would appear except by an examination of the holdings in the several combinations; and this group is, as we have said, continually growing smaller. They have, for the

most part, risen from the ranks, and keep their own position and maintain the status of the Trusts by sheer force of character, financial knowledge, and unflagging energy. For, it is to be observed, that the great power they wield is not to be transmitted to another in the ordinary course of inheritance or bequest. The heads of the Trusts are paid great salaries for the work they perform, inasmuch as they are the actual managers as well as chief shareholders and figure-heads, and those salaries may be said to be the fair reward of extraordinary commercial ability.

But the initiative in the formation of Trusts, or the extension of Trusts, lies, in the greater number of the newer instances of combination, less with the heads of the Trusts, or the manufacturers and producers of a commodity concerned, than with certain speculators, who may be termed outsiders, who, noting the tendency of the times and the opportunities offered for amassing a vast fortune at a coup, have made it their business to cast about in all directions of the industrial compass for opportunities for acting as the mediums of amalgamation. Mr. Leiter, for example, whose failure two or three years ago in his attempt to form a Wheat Trust, was a speculator pure and simple. And to this category must also belong one of the most prolific and successful Trust organizers of the day, Mr. Morgan, as well as Mr. W. H. Moore of Chicago, and Mr. A. N. Brady of New York.

It is this new phase, and the existence of these new factors, which constitutes the danger; because it is a forced and artificial process, one not naturally arising, which perhaps never would arise, out of natural trade conditions. It is a fiscal ability, and the speculative instinct grafted upon the best talent for trade and commerce.

It also, but in a remoter sense, may be held to constitute the safeguard against a commercial despotism; because it will soon grow as profitable to unmake Trusts as to make them. A Trust is, in its essence, a tyranny; but a plurality of tyrants is incompatible with serious danger to the State. And, besides, it may safely be assumed that in a republic like America not even the strongest and most compact combination will altogether

prevent merit from forcing its way through the barrier which has thus been erected; while, again, the burden to the consumer can never be too great for his endurance if the monopoly of the strongest Trust is not backed by Statute; and if foreign competitors are not included in the sphere of the Trust's operations or excluded by a too exalted protective customs tariff.

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