About forty years since, in America at least, the tide would appear once more to have turned.  I fix the moment of flux, as I am apt to do, by a lawsuit.  This suit was the Morris Run Coal Company v. Barclay Coal Company,[5] which is the first modern anti-monopoly litigation that I have met with in the United States.  It was decided in Pennsylvania in 1871; and since 1871, while the area within which competition is possible has been kept constant by the tariff, capital has accumulated and has been concentrated and volatilized until, within this republic, substantially all prices are fixed by a vast moneyed mass.  This mass, obeying what amounts to being a single volition, has its heart in Wall Street, and pervades every corner of the Union.  No matter what price is in question, whether it be the price of meat, or coal, or cotton cloth, or of railway transportation, or of insurance, or of discounts, the inquirer will find the price to be, in essence, a monopoly or fixed price; and if he will follow his investigation to the end, he will also find that the first cause in the complex chain of cause and effect which created the monopoly in that mysterious energy which is enthroned on the Hudson.

The presence of monopolistic prices in trade is not always a result of conscious agreement; more frequently, perhaps, it is automatic, and is an effect of the concentration of capital in a point where competition ceases, as when all the capital engaged in a trade belongs to a single owner.  Supposing ownership to be enough restricted, combination is easier and more profitable than competition; therefore combination, conscious or unconscious, supplants competition.  The inference from the evidence is that, in the United States, capital has reached, or is rapidly reaching, this point of concentration; and if this be true, competition cannot be enforced by legislation.  But, assuming that competition could still be enforced by law, the only effect would be to make the mass of capital more homogeneous by eliminating still further such of the weaker capitalists as have survived.  Ultimately, unless indeed society is to dissolve and capital migrate elsewhere, all the present phenomena would be intensified.  Nor would free trade, probably, have more than a very transitory effect.  In no department of trade is competition freer than in the Atlantic passenger service, and yet in no trade is there a stricter monopoly price.

The same acceleration of the social movement which has caused this centralization of capital has caused the centralization of another form of human energy, which is its negative:  labor unions organize labor as a monopoly.  Labor protests against the irresponsible sovereignty of capital, as men have always protested against irresponsible sovereignty, declaring that the capitalistic social system, as it now exists, is a form of slavery.  Very logically, therefore, the abler and bolder labor agitators proclaim that labor levies actual war against society, and that in that war there can be no truce until irresponsible capital has capitulated.  Also, in labor’s methods of warfare the same phenomena appear as in the autocracy of capital.  Labor attacks capitalistic society by methods beyond the purview of the law, and may, at any moment, shatter the social system; while, under our laws and institutions, society is helpless.