The battle against the “trusts” is conspicuously “on.” I venture to predict that it will fail, and to think that it ought to fail. That it ought to fail is, in this bad world, no good reason for thinking that it will; there is a strong numerical presumption the other way. For doubting the success of this “movement” there are reasons having nothing to do with the righteousness or unrighteousness of the cause. One is that the entire trend of our modern civilization is toward combination and aggregation. In the “concert of the great powers” of Europe we see its most significant, most beneficent and grandest manifestation. Denounce it how we will, fight it as we may, we are powerless to stay its advance in any department of human activity, social, industrial, commercial, military, political. It is the dominant phenomenon of our time. Labor combines into “unions,” capital into “trusts,” and each aggregation is powerful in everything except in combating its own methods in the other. The newspaper denounces the one or the other—and joins a syndicate of newspapers. “Department stores” spring up all over the land, draw the fire of the demagogue and are impotently condemned in the platform of the political trust that he adorns. Our great hotels are examples of the same centripetal law, and offices move to the center into buildings overlooking the church spires. Small farms are disappearing; railways absorb other railways and by pooling interests with those unabsorbed, evoke impotent legislation and vain “decisions.” Cities swallow and digest their suburbs. There are such things as guilds of authors; tramps devastate in organized bodies, and there has been even a congress of religions. In the larger politics we observe the same tendency to aggregation; everywhere the unit of control is enlarging. In the Western Hemisphere we have had Pan-American congresses and seen the genesis of the Dominion of Canada. The United States have set up, and must henceforth maintain, what is virtually a protectorate of American Republics—a policy which commits us to their defense in every dispute with a European power, gives us a living interest in all their affairs and makes every square foot of South America in some sense United States territory. Beyond the Atlantic it is the same. The entire continent of Africa is being parted among a few European nations already swollen to enormous growth by vast accretions of colonial dominion. And all over the world colonial federation is in the air. In Europe itself states are drawn together into kingdoms, kingdoms into empires. United Italy and United Germany are conspicuous and significant examples. Whether in the Other World a movement is afoot to establish Greater Heaven by annexing Hell neither the celestial ambassadors have informed us from the pulpit, nor the infernal from the tribune.