Effective competition in retail trade sometimes requires concentration, sometimes dispersion of business. But the most characteristic modern movement in retail trade is a combination of the centralising and dispersive tendencies, and is related to the enlargement of the business-unit which we found proceeding everywhere in industry. The large distributing company with a number of local branch agents, who call regularly at the house of the consumer for orders, is the most highly organised form of retail trade. In all the departments of regular and general consumption the movement is towards this constant house-to-house supply. The wealthier classes in towns have already learned to purchase all the more perishable forms of food and many other articles of house consumption in this way, while the growing facilities of postage and conveyance of goods enable them to purchase from a large central store by means of a price-list all other consumables into which the element of individual taste or caprice does not largely enter. This habit is spreading in the smaller towns among the middle classes, so that the small dispersed retail businesses are becoming more and more dependent upon the supply of the needs of the working classes, and of such articles of comfort and luxury as may appeal to the less regular and calculable tastes of the moneyed classes. Just as in towns we have a constant automatic supply of water and gas instead of an intermittent supply dependent on a number of individual acts of purchase, so it seems likely that all the routine wants of the consumer will be supplied. How far mechanical inventions may be applied to increase the facility and cheapen the cost of this distribution it is difficult to say. The automatic machine for distributing matches and sweetmeats is adaptable to most forms of routine consumption. In the larger stores many kinds of labour-saving machinery are already applied. As steam or electric power is adopted more widely in the local transport services the retail distribution of goods from a large single centre is likely to proceed apace, and a displacement of human labour by machinery similar to that which is taking place in manufacture will take place in distribution. So far as the wants of large classes of the public become regular and their consumption measurable in quantity, machinery will unquestionably take over the labour of distribution, especially in the large towns which are absorbing in a way convenient for mechanical distribution a larger proportion of the consuming public. With each new encroachment of machinery into the domain of the distributing trades the characteristics of machine-industry, enlarged mass of the business, increased area of the market, increased complexity of relations to other trades, increased specialisation of local activity will be clearly discernible.