(2) The power of a large business to secure and maintain the sole use of some patent or trade secret in machinery or method of manufacture which would otherwise have gone to another firm, or would have become public property in the trade, represents no public economy, and sometimes a public loss. Where such improvement is due solely to the skill and enterprise of a business man, and would not have passed into use unless the sole right were secured to his business, this economy belongs to the productive class. (3) The superior ability of a large business to depress wages by the possession of a total or partial monopoly of local employment, the corresponding power to obtain raw material at low prices, or to extort higher prices from consumers than would obtain under the pressure of free competition, represent individual business economies which may enable a large business to obtain higher profits. § 3. Now all these forces operative in trades which are said to be subject to the law of increasing returns tend to increase the size and to diminish the number of businesses competing within a given area. In some industries the expanding size of the market or area of competition keeps pace with this movement, so that the total number of the larger competitors within the market may be as great as before. But in most of the markets the growing scale of the business is attended by an absolute diminution in the number of effective competitors, or at any rate by an increase which is very much smaller than the increase in the amount of trade that is done. So long as we have merely the substitution of a smaller number of large competing businesses for a larger number of small ones, no radical change is effected in the nature of industry. So long as every purchaser is able to buy from two or more equally developed and effectively competing firms he can make them bid against one another until he obtains the full advantage of the economies of large-scale production which are common to them. So long as there remains effective competition, all the productive economies pass into the hands of the consumer in reduction of price. Nay, more than this, a competing firm cannot keep to itself the advantages of a private individual economy if its competitor has another private economy of equal importance. If A and B are two closely competing firms, A owning a special machine capable of earning for him 2 per cent. above the normal trade profit, and B owning a similar advantage by possession of "cheaper labour," these private economies will be cancelled by competition, and pass into the pocket of the consuming public.