business man's work in reorganizing business enterprises on a larger scale ; particularly does this standardization serve his ends by permitting a uniform routine in accounting, invoices, contracts,' etc., and so admitting a large central accounting system, with homogeneous ramifications, Bwdi as I will give a competent conspectus of the pecaniary situation of the enterprise at any given time.
The great, at the present stage of development perhaps the greatest, opportunity for saving by consolidation, in the common run of cases, is afforded by the ubiquitous and in a sense. excessive presence of business enterprise in the economic system. It is' in doing away with' unnecessary bushiesfi transactions and industrially futile ana
nceuvring on the part of independent firms that the promoter of combmationa finds hb most telling opportunity- So that it is scarcely an oveiv statement to say that probably the largest, assuredly the securest and moat unquestionable, service rendered by the great modem captains of industry is this curtailment of the business to be done, — this sweeping retirement of business men as a class from the service and the definitive cancelment of opportunities for private enterprise.
So long as related industrial units are under different business managements, they are, by the nature of the case, at cross-piurposes, and business consolidation remedies this untoward feature of the industrial system by eliminating the pecuniary element from the interstices of the system as far as may be. The interstitial adjustments of the industrial system at large are in this way withdrawn from the discretion of rival business men, and the work of pecuniary management previously involved is in large part dispensed with, with the result that there is a saving of work and an avoidance of that systematic mutual hindrance that characterizes the competitive manage,ment of industry. To the community at large I the work of pecuniary management, it appears,