The strongest objections, however, to the great aggregations are found in the possibility of oppression through a monopoly of business, and therefore almost absolute control by a few persons of the interests not only of a large body of employés, but of every competitor upon a smaller scale. A large combination practically compels all to yield to its methods. The certain economy of methods has led to the statement, "Where combination is possible, competition ceases." The common saying, "Competition is the life of trade," becomes untrue whenever that competition implies a costly service. Competition is supposed to reduce cost by stimulating energy and ingenuity. But when that ingenuity can be better applied in combination, the result is the destruction of competition. Competition may drive the milk wagon faster, but combination will deliver more quarts of milk in the same time. The natural opposition to combination rests upon the same ground as the opposition to improved machinery. It certainly throws out of their ordinary employment a considerable number of independent workers.
This power of the combination is a constant temptation to unscrupulous and grasping managers to increase their advantage by vicious discrimination and false competition, expecting the destruction of others' business to increase their own. The largeness of the operation makes more plain the injustice of the maxim, "All is fair in trade." The final dangers of combination are thus likely to be overestimated. It is not true that any larger proportion of false methods of business enters into the large establishment than into the small, and the possibility of profit in a great combination is quite as truly dependent upon the universal welfare as anywhere. The same extremes of prices mark the range for these establishments as for any others. The price cannot continue higher than buyers will pay with an increasing disposition to buy more. It cannot remain lower, of course, than will enable sellers to continue living as well as in any other business. Checks upon increased price come as certainly from substitutes as from rival production, and the ability of the people will always gauge the amount of sales. The expression "What the trade will bear," means a price such as not to diminish consumption. Indeed, the business principles of a great trust are essentially the same as those in any single manufactory. A trust which stops the work of certain factories in a combination for the sake of diminishing the output, because of danger to prices from too rapid production, follows the same principle as a farmer who stops raising wheat from the probability of too much wheat in the market. The farmer would better lose the use of his land for a time than lose the advantage of both land and labor by over-production of wheat. In the same way a trust may wisely hold its fixed capital unproductive till the consumption of the community reaches the full extent of its power to produce. The power of one combination to interfere with the workings of another by indirect methods, like investment in the other's stock, is an evil to be treated like any fraud. Laws and courts are in the power of the people, and should preserve the rights of all.