must always displace the mode which is more expensive: as Prof. Richard Ely expresses it, "Production on the largest possible scale will be the only practical mode of production in the near future." We need not stop to prove the statement that the cost of production by the modern factory system is a small fraction of that by the old workshop system. The fact that the former has beaten the latter in the race of competition would prove it, if it were not evident to the most careless observer. But it is also a fact that the trust, apart from its character as a monopoly, is actually a means of cheapening production over the system by independent factories, for it carries it on on a larger scale than it has ever before been conducted. Our review of the trust from the trust makers' standpoint showed this most forcibly; and we shall see more of it as we study further the methods by which the monopoly gains an advantage over the independent producer in dispensing with what we may call the waste of competition. In the argument presented by the Standard Oil Trust before the House Committee on Manufactures in the summer of 1888, occurs the following statement of the work which that monopoly has done in cheapening production:
Table of Contents
II. TRUSTS AND MONOPOLIES IN MANUFACTURING INDUSTRIES.
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