One great danger of large combinations is the tendency to govern by iron rule instead of by fair judgment of individual cases. This is a difficulty always connected with great enterprises, to be cured as growth advances through establishing well trained experts whose judgment makes the rules not only good in themselves, but well executed. The government itself is subject to the same difficulty, as seen in the handling of an army, and is obliged to meet it in the same way. Even the abuses often referred to from enormous difference of wages between the executive officers and the inferior operatives are quite possibly only a natural method for solving these difficulties. A first-class officer has no difficulty with his men. In general those institutions whose management is costly do better for their workmen than the weaker institutions with weaker men at the head.
The supposed dangers from too rapid improvement in the machinery of production are scarcely to be credited in the light of improvements during the last hundred years. Every improvement has certainly given a larger enjoyment and better employment to the masses of people. The enterprise which invents better ways of accomplishing anything is the best possible means for enlarging and stimulating the wants and abilities of the whole people. The very profits themselves are sure to awaken larger enterprise, and even if the accumulated surplus is distributed in so-called watered stock, it does not cease to promote production. The wider the distribution of stock, the more permanent and more generally satisfactory is the working of the great combination. If employés themselves become sharers in the business, the true interests of all are likely to be promoted. When the savings of the multitude can be perfectly united in a joint stock company, to furnish the capital with which the same people work, the general conditions of wealth production for all the community are fairly met.
_Bonanza farms._--An illustration of some effects of aggregation may be seen in the enormous farms of the wheat regions of America. There machinery is introduced as far as possible, all work is methodically planned and executed, and wholesale rates in purchases and in transportation are secured. The result is that certain staple products, especially wheat, are raised at a cost far below the average cost to moderate farmers. The result is large profits upon the capital invested, in spite of the fact that such farms do not make best use of soil fertility and certainly do not maintain the best condition of soil for future use. This, however, is due rather to the nature of pioneer farming, which makes immediate use of the powers of the soil, than to the nature of the management. It is conceivable that the same ingenuity may continue the development of large farms under greatly improved agriculture. In that case the general effect will be much more widely felt than now. So far it seems that bonanza farming is confined to a very few lines of production, where everything is bent in the direction of lessening labor instead of benefiting the soil or making homes.