Everywhere this process is at work.  Competing firms are in every trade, where their small numbers permit, striving to come to closer terms than formerly, and either secretly or openly joining forces so as to get full control over the production or distribution of some product, in order to manipulate prices for their own profit.  From railways and corn-stores down to slate-pencils, coffins, and sticking-plaster, everything is tending to fall under the power of a Trust.  Many of these Trusts fail to secure the union of a sufficient proportion of the large competitors, or quarrels spring up among the combining firms, or some new firms enter into competition too strong to be fought or bought over.  In these ways a large number of the Trusts have hitherto broken down, and will doubtless continue to break down.  In England, this step in capitalist evolution is only beginning to be taken.  In glass, paper, salt, coal, and a few other commodities, combinations more permanent than the mere Ring or Corner, and closer than the ordinary masters’ unions, have been formed.  But Free Trade, which leaves us open to the less calculable and controllable element of foreign competition, and the fact that the earlier stages of concentration of capital are not yet completed here in most trades, have hitherto retarded the growth of the successful Trust in England.  Even in America there is no case where the monopoly of a Trust reigns absolute through the whole country, though many of them enjoy a local control of production and prices which is practically unrestricted.  Excepting in the case of the Standard Oil Trust, and a few less important bodies which enjoy the control of some local monopoly, such as anthracite coal, the supremacy of the leading Trust or Syndicate is brought in certain places into direct conflict with other more or less independent competing bodies.  In other words, the evolution of capital, which tends ever to the establishment of competition between a smaller number of larger masses, has nowhere worked out the logical conclusion which means the condensation of the few large competing bodies into a single mass.  This final step, which presents a completely organized trade with the element of competition utterly eliminated under the control of a single body of mere joint-owners of the capital engaged, must be regarded as the goal, the ideal culmination of the concentrative movement of modern capital.  It is said that more than one-third of the business in the United States is already controlled by Trusts.  But most of them have only in part succeeded in their effort to escape from competition by integrating their personal interests into a single homogeneous mass.  Even in cases where they do rule the market untrammelled by the direct interference of any competitors, they are still deterred from a free use of their control over prices by the possibility of competition which any full use of this control might give rise to.  For it does not follow that even where a Trust holds an absolute monopoly of the market of a locality, that it will be able to maintain that monopoly were it to raise its prices beyond a certain point.  In proportion, however, as experience yields a greater skill in the management of Trusts, and their growing strength enables them to more successfully defy outside attempts at competition, their power to raise prices and increase their rates of profit would rise accordingly.