I have compiled a table from the census reports, dealing with textile industries alone, because that branch of manufacturing was the oldest and one of the greatest, as it is to-day, and because it illustrates perhaps better than any other the progress of principles, rather than the influence of special causes, particularly through this twenty-year period of which I am writing:
TEXTILE INDUSTRIES OF THE UNITED STATES
| Year | No. | Average Capital | Av. No. of Employés | Product Average |
| 1860 | 3027 | 50,000 | 65 | 75,500 |
| 1870 | 4790 | 62,500 | 57 | 108,600 |
| 1880 | 4018 | 103,000 | 96 | 144,000 |
In these few figures all the industrial history of that great period may be found epitomized. The number of plants, instead of increasing as the volume of demand for products increased, was contracted. The leadership of the trade, and, therefore, the making of prices, was taken by the houses of larger capital. The average capital employed in the trade doubled in the twenty years. The output also doubled for the average factory. The number of employés, on the other hand, increased but half. Better machinery, more efficient control over the workers, more drastic industrial discipline, fiercer industrial competition for individual work, did their destiny-appointed task.
Here one begins to see on this broad canvas, but faint in outline, the tracing of the picture of America to-day. The chains began to tighten. Men who had grown to comfortable wealth in the long period of small factories, scattered industries, and free and easy industrial democracy, began to gather together into industrial groups. Little industries were rolled together into big industries. The capital of the factory expanded, doubling, on an average, in the decade. At the same time, by more intense methods of carrying on the trades, the number of employés needed to produce a given value of products was cut down.
Let me turn, for a moment, to introduce a slight record of that industry which has done more, perhaps, than any other to bring about the creation of the class of whom I write—the idle rich. I have not dwelt upon it in the beginnings of American industry, for it was scarcely existent. I refer to the iron and steel industry.
In 1860 there were in this country only 402 plants manufacturing wrought, forged, and rolled iron. They used an average of $58,000 of capital apiece, produced products worth $91,000 each, and employed an average of 55 men. In 1880—twenty years—there were 1,005 such plants, with an average capital of $23,000, average products of $296,005, and an average roll of 121 men. Here the evolution of an industry from the small, scattered plants to the concentrated, efficient, and powerful “combine” is unmistakable.
To summarize: In this twenty-year period, the value of products trebled, while the number of workers doubled. The wealth-producing capacity of each worker increased from $1,438 to $2,015.
If the tendency toward monopoly was striking in the twenty years from 1860 to 1880, what may one say of the twenty years that followed? In the iron and steel trade, the 699 plants of 1880, with an average production of $419,000 each, became 668 with an average production of $1,203,500 in 1900. The average number of employés per plant rose from 197 to 333. In the cotton mills, the average number of employés in each mill rose during the same period from 287 to 1,185.
Here is the birthplace of the idle rich. Hundreds of men who had owned small manufacturing plants sold them out at good profits in the first ten years of this era and retired to live on the proceeds. Men who, twenty years before, had built their puny mills on river banks and rapidly developed them into great wealth-producing plants by natural growth, then turned them over to the trusts and combinations at prices that would have staggered the imagination of the fathers of the industry.