It is a well known historical fact that the extraction of metals and minerals from the earth has been more subject to monopoly than almost any other business. It was, and in a large part of the civilized world still is, esteemed a prerogative of the sovereign. Agricultural products have always been gathered from a wide area; manufactures were formerly the product of mean and scattered workshops; but in the working of a rich mine, there was a constant income more princely than was to be obtained from any other single source. Again, with all due respect to the traditions of former generations, it seems to have been thought that any thing to which no one else had a valid title belonged to the crown; and as no one was able to assert any stronger claim to the ownership of mineral wealth than that they had stumbled upon it, it was natural for the sovereign to claim it as his. We see thus the recognition at an early date of the inherent difference between natural wealth and that created by labor.
But coming down to the present time, it is evident that the business of extracting some of the rarer metals from the earth is peculiarly liable to become a monopoly. It is one of the new laws of trade, whose force and importance we are just finding out, that the ease of restricting competition varies with the number of competing units which must be combined. Our most valuable metal, iron, is so widely distributed that any attempt to control the whole available supply could not long be successful. But it is one of the peculiarities of modern industry that by its specialization it furnishes constant opportunities for the establishment of new forms of monopoly, whose power is not generally understood. In the manufacture of Bessemer steel, which has now largely displaced wrought iron in the arts, it is necessary to use an iron ore of peculiar