THE THEORY OF MODERN WELFARE 243
industrial improveraeata under the control of the trust, in bo far as the trust successfully carries its point. This feature of trust management will be taken up again in a different counection.
In addition to its prime purpose of checking the decline of earnings on past investments, such a business coalition ia also enabled to distribute any unavoidable effect of the progressively reduced cost of production of the productive goods employed, somewhat equably over the entire field of industry comprised in the coalition, and so obviate the pressure of this untoward industrial progress falling with exceptional severity at any given point. Economies effected are at the same time made to accrue to the collective business organization, showing themselves in the way of increased dividends and increased effective (market) capitalization of the coalition's property, instead of being dissipated in competitive selling, and so going to the body of consumers or to the industrial system at large.
To return to a point temporarily set aside above. By supposition, in what has just been said, anything like a speculative inflation has been excluded from the discussion of business depression ; and necessarily so, since the two do not come at the' same time. But at one point the two show a feature in common. Under both of these two widely different conditions of the business situation