Even in agriculture, where close personal care and the limitations of a local market temper the larger tendency, the recent annals of Western America and Australia supply startling evidence of the concentrative force of machinery.

The following figures illustrate the meaning of this movement from the American cotton trade, which is not one of the industries most susceptible to the concentrative pressure.

The concentrative adhesive forces are everywhere driving the competing masses of capital to seek safety, and escape waste and destruction, by welding themselves into still larger masses, renouncing the competition with one another in order to compete more successfully with other large bodies.

In trades where the concentrative process has proceeded furthest this warfare is naturally fiercest.

This final step, which presents a completely organized trade with the element of competition utterly eliminated under the control of a single body of mere joint-owners of the capital engaged, must be regarded as the goal, the ideal culmination of the concentrative movement of modern capital.

It is not necessary to follow in detail the concentrative process which is gradually welding labour into larger units of competition.

This concentrative process at work in both capital and labour, consolidating the smaller industrial units into larger ones, and tending to a unification of the masses of capital and of labour engaged respectively in the several industries, is at the present time by far the most important factor of industrial history.

Although the very growth and existence of the larger industrial units implies, as we saw, a laying aside of smaller conflicts, we cannot assume that the forces at present working directly for the pacification of capital and labour, and for their ultimate fusion, are at all commensurate in importance with the concentrative forces operating in the two industrial elements respectively.

I think this will be wisest, especially as my space is small, and mood concentrative rather than erratic.