It will be understood, consequently, how inevitably these big corporations strengthen one another's hands; and it must be added that they had political as well as economic motives for so doing.

Although the big fellows sometimes indulge in the luxury of fierce fighting, such fights are always the prelude to still closer agreements.

They are all embarked in the same boat; and surrounded as they are by an increasing amount of enmity, provoked by their aggrandizement, they have every reason to lend one another constant and effective support.
There may be discerned in this peculiar organization of American industry an entangling alliance between a wholesome and a baleful tendency.

The purpose which prompted men like John D.Rockefeller to escape from the savage warfare in which so many American business men were engaged, was in itself a justifiable and ameliorating purpose.
Competition in American business was insufficiently moderated either by the state or by the prevailing temper of American life.

No sensible and resourceful man will submit to such a precarious existence without making some attempt to escape from it; and if the means which Mr.
Rockefeller and others took to secure themselves served to make the business lives of their competitors still more precarious, such a result was only the expiation which American business men were obliged to pay for their own excesses.