This condition of ruinous competition must be recognised as the normal condition of all highly-organised businesses where modern machinery is applied, and which are not sheltered by some private economy in the shape of special facilities in producing or in disposing of their goods. Even the Standard Oil Company, as we saw, claimed that a policy of consolidation was forced upon it by the conditions of the market. But this claim is not a refutation, but an admission of the statement that the object of a Trust is to obtain monopoly prices; for these ruinously low prices and profits are the result of free competition, and the only alternative to this free competition is monopoly. Hence it is a legitimate conclusion that the economic object of a Trust is to substitute monopoly for competitive prices, and to do this more effectively than can be done by the mere acceptance of a common price-list by the separate firms engaged in a branch of production. In order to attain this object it is not necessary that the Trust shall comprise all the capital engaged in an industry. Even when the Standard Oil Trust was firmly established, and was, according to its own admission, paying 12-1/2 or 13 per cent. on its highly-watered stock, there appears to have existed no fewer than 111 smaller independent companies competing with it directly or indirectly at some point within the area of its market.[134] But the Standard Oil Trust was able to control prices, as the producer of some 75 per cent. of the total product, and the practical monopolist over the main area of its market. Similarly the Sugar Refineries Trust in 1888 had a firm grip over prices by its possession of 80 per cent. of the sugar refining capacity of the Atlantic Coast, or 65 per cent. of the sugar consumed in the United States.[135] There are other cases where a formally constructed Trust is for a time engaged in close effective competition, either with another Trust, as was the position of the Standard Oil Trust over a portion of its markets in the period 1881 to 1884, or with powerful companies not organised as Trusts. This is what Mr. Gunton appears to consider the normal condition of a Trust, one in which competition takes place between a few large bodies of capital instead of between many smaller bodies.[136] Certain Trusts have certainly been compelled to struggle for the retention of their monopoly power over the market. A notorious example is that of the Sugar Trust, which, after a most successful start in 1888, found itself in 1890 face to face with a new and formidable competitor in the shape of the Claus Spreckles refineries of Philadelphia and San Francisco, and was compelled to forego the high profits it had been making and fight for its existence under terms of keenest competition.