THE PASSING OF THE MIDDLE CLASS.
Yet let us not go so fast. It is necessary to remember that the last few decades have constituted a period of startling transitions.
The middle class, comprising the small business and factory men, stubbornly insisted on adhering to worn-out methods of doing business. Its only conception of industry was that of the methods of the year 1825. It refused to see that the centralization of industry was inevitable, and that it meant progress. It lamented the decay of its own power, and tried by every means at its command to thwart the purposes of the trusts. This middle class had bribed and cheated and had exploited the worker. For decades it had shaped public opinion to support the dictum that "competition was the life of trade." It had, by this shaping of opinion, enrolled on its side a large number of workers who saw only the temporary evils, and not the ultimate good, involved in the scientific organization and centralization of industry. The middle class put through anti-trust laws and other measure after measure aimed at the great combinations.
These great combinations had, therefore, a double fight on their hands. On the one hand they had to resist the trades unions, and on the other, the middle class. It was necessary to their interests that centralization of industry should continue. In fact, it was historically and economically necessary. Consequently they had to bend every effort to make nugatory any effort of Government, both National and State, to enforce the anti-trust laws. The thing had to be done no matter how. It was intolerable that industrial development could be stopped by a middle class which, for self-interest, would have kept matters at a standstill. Self-interest likewise demanded that the nascent combinations and trusts get and exercise governmental power by any means they could use. For a while triumphant in passing certain laws which, it was fatuously expected, would wipe the trusts out of existence, the middle class was hopelessly beaten and routed. By their far greater command of resources and money, the great magnates were able to frustrate the execution of those laws, and gradually to install themselves or their tools in practically supreme power. The middle class is now becoming a mere memory. Even the frantic efforts of President Roosevelt in its behalf were of absolutely no avail; the trusts are mightier than ever before, and hold a sway the disputing of which is ineffective.