"Edward Bellamy. Lookimg Backward From 2000 to 1887" - читать интересную книгу автора

check it proves that there must have been a strong economical
reason for it. The small capitalists, with their innumerable petty
concerns, had in fact yielded the field to the great aggregations
of capital, because they belonged to a day of small things and
were totally incompetent to the demands of an age of steam and
telegraphs and the gigantic scale of its enterprises. To restore the
former order of things, even if possible, would have involved
returning to the day of stagecoaches. Oppressive and intolerable
as was the regime of the great consolidations of capital, even its
victims, while they cursed it, were forced to admit the prodigious
increase of efficiency which had been imparted to the national
industries, the vast economies effected by concentration of
management and unity of organization, and to confess that since
the new system had taken the place of the old the wealth of the
world had increased at a rate before undreamed of. To be sure
this vast increase had gone chiefly to make the rich richer,
increasing the gap between them and the poor; but the fact
remained that, as a means merely of producing wealth, capital
had been proved efficient in proportion to its consolidation. The
restoration of the old system with the subdivision of capital, if it
were possible, might indeed bring back a greater equality of
conditions, with more individual dignity and freedom, but it
would be at the price of general poverty and the arrest of
material progress.

"Was there, then, no way of commanding the services of the
mighty wealth-producing principle of consolidated capital without
bowing down to a plutocracy like that of Carthage? As soon
as men began to ask themselves these questions, they found the
answer ready for them. The movement toward the conduct of
business by larger and larger aggregations of capital, the
tendency toward monopolies, which had been so desperately and
vainly resisted, was recognized at last, in its true significance, as a
process which only needed to complete its logical evolution to
open a golden future to humanity.

"Early in the last century the evolution was completed by the
final consolidation of the entire capital of the nation. The
industry and commerce of the country, ceasing to be conducted
by a set of irresponsible corporations and syndicates of private
persons at their caprice and for their profit, were intrusted to a
single syndicate representing the people, to be conducted in the
common interest for the common profit. The nation, that is to
say, organized as the one great business corporation in which all
other corporations were absorbed; it became the one capitalist in
the place of all other capitalists, the sole employer, the final
monopoly in which all previous and lesser monopolies were
swallowed up, a monopoly in the profits and economies of which
all citizens shared. The epoch of trusts had ended in The Great
Trust. In a word, the people of the United States concluded to