A hundred years ago an industry consisted of a half a dozen or a dozen men, working under the personal supervision of an owner, and using crude hand tools. Today it consists of a gigantic trust, owning and managing scores and perhaps hundreds of mills and factories, each employing thousands of workers. A corporation like the Steel Trust owns enough of the sources of its raw material to give it practical monopoly; it owns a fleet of vessels especially designed for ore-carrying; it owns its private railroads, to deliver the ore to the mills. Through its system of dummy directorates it has practical control of the main railroads over which it distributes its products; also of banks and trust companies and insurance companies, to gather the money of the public to finance its undertakings. It owns huge office buildings, and vast tracts of land upon which the homes of its workers are built. It has a private army for the defense of its property--a complete army of cavalry, infantry and artillery, including a large and highly efficient secret service department, with a host of informers and spies. It has newspapers for the purpose of propaganda, and it controls the government of every village, town and city in which it has important interests. If you will take the trouble to visit a "steel town," and make inquiries among public officials, newspaper men, and others who are "on the inside," you will discover that those in authority consider it necessary and proper that "steel" should control, and are unable to conceive any other condition of affairs. If you go to other parts of the country, where other great industries are located, you find it taken for granted that "copper" should control, or "lumber," or "coal," or "oil," or whatever it may be. Under the system of large scale capitalism, labor is a commodity, bought and sold in the market like any other commodity. Some years ago Congress was requested to pass a law contradicting this fundamental fact of world capitalism. Congress passed a law, very carefully worded so that no one could be sure what it meant, and a few years later the Supreme Court nullified the law. But all through this political and legal controversy the status of labor remained exactly the same; there was a "labor market," consisting of those members of the community who, in the formula of Marx, had nothing but their labor power to sell. These competed for recognition at the factory gates, and highly skilled foremen selected those who offered the largest quantity of labor power for the stated wage.