in a mystery that the ordinary mind did not penetrate, under the cloud of which they have wrested undue personal gain. The conversion by men to their personal ownership of funds and estates held by them as trustees was an abuse from which the common law for centuries was inadequate to afford immunity. The development of the ethical trust relation sustained by those in active conduct of the great industrial organizations of this century to those whose funds are invested therein has been more rapid than the development of the legal safeguards for the protection of that relation. But as every abuse is the forerunner and the cause of its own remedy, the deleterious manipulation of stocks, bonds, and securities of every sort must give way before a public intelligence that tends more and more to a perception of the methods by which it has been possible. And this intelligence will compel the embodiment in legal codes of measures that will place these recently developed trusteeships upon as clearly defined and safe a basis as the earlier and simpler trusteeships were placed by the system of jurisprudence and jurisdiction organized by the Earl of Nottingham.
It is frequently asserted that a nation's industries are in most healthful condition when conducted by a great number of independent producers. If carried to its logical conclusion, this implies that the village artisan who employs one man to assist him is guilty of an act of injustice. For otherwise, if A has a right to better his condition by working for wages under the direction of B, why should not both A and B, if they can better their condition by doing so, work for wages under the direction of C? And why should not scores and hundreds of men work under the direction of the master mind of Z? It is true that whether impelled by the desire to obtain increased profits, or by the constant demand for the reduction of prices, it is the tendency of an industrial combination to absorb the performance of the functions contributing to the manufacture of its ultimate product, thereby either destroying or curtailing the profits of those theretofore engaged in the performance of those functions. For example, but a few years ago the placing in the Northwestern markets of coal from the Pittsburg bituminous coal field involved the making of profits by the mine producing goal, the agent in Pittsburg that purchased it on commission, the firm who employed him, the company over whose docks it was loaded in vessels at the ports of Lake Erie, the owners of the vessels which carried it to the Northwest, the owners of the docks on which it was unloaded at the head of the lakes, and the dealers who disposed of it in the various Northwestern cities. The pressure of competition reducing the possibility of separate profits has forced the combination of these different agencies of production and distribution for in-
