But the Great Northern
Railroad Company found it simpler and more secure to do business with
one large than a number of small companies; and in this way the Steel
Corporation has obtained almost a monopoly of the raw material most
necessary to the production of finished steel. 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.
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