§ 7. The motive which induces a number of businesses hitherto separate, or associated merely for certain specific actions, such as the fixing of prices or wages, to amalgamate so that they form a single capital on which a single rate of interest is paid, is a double-edged one. There is, on the one hand, the desire to protect themselves against excessive competition and cutting of rates, and on the other hand a desire to secure the advantages which arise from monopoly. The way in which Syndicates and Trusts are regarded depends very much from which of these two aspects they are regarded. Those who consider these business "combines" as arbitrary and high-handed interferences with freedom of commerce, undertaken in order to place in the hands of a few persons a power to rob and oppress the consuming public by legalised extortion, regard the motive of combination to be monopoly. On the other hand, the combining firms represent themselves as the victims of circumstances, bound in self-protection to combine. Our analysis of the operations of commercial competition enables us to see that these two forces are not really separate, but are only two ways of looking at the same action. Every avoidance of so-called "excessive" competition is _ipso facto_ an establishment of a monopoly. The tariff of prices established a weak and partial monopoly. The "combine," whether it takes the name of "ring," "syndicate," or "trust," succeeds, in so far as it establishes a stronger and more absolute monopoly. In their economic aspect these terms are somewhat vague, the vagueness arising in some degree from the changing and secret shapes these combinations often find it convenient to adopt in order to preserve the appearance of competition, or to avoid public obloquy or legal interference. "Combine" is probably the generic term which covers all these operations. A syndicate of capitalists are said to form a "combine" with the view of controlling prices so as to pay a profitable interest. If they apply their capital not to the acquisition of the plant and machinery of manufacture with the view of regulating production, but directly and mainly to the planning of some speculative stroke or series of strokes in the produce market, obtaining temporary control of sufficient goods of a particular kind to enable them to manipulate prices, they are said to form a "corner" or "ring." Such forms of combined action are generally of short duration. Technically they consist in an artificial diversion[125] of a particular class of goods from the ordinary channel of a number of competing owners into a single ownership, so that they may be held and placed upon the supply market at such times and in such ways as to enable the owner to obtain a famine price. The following description of a wheat "corner" will serve to exemplify this method of "combine":--