the scope of industry, to change its _locale_, to abandon certain branches and take up others, to substitute machinery for hand labour, without any regard to the welfare of the employees who have been associated with the fixed capital formerly in use. When to this we add the reflection that the ability to choose its workmen out of an artificially made over-supply of labour, rid of the competition of other employers, gives the Trust a well-nigh absolute power to fix wages, hours of work, to pay in truck, and generally to dictate terms of employment and conditions of life, we understand the feeling of distrust and antagonism with which the working classes regard the growth of these great monopolies on both sides of the Atlantic. The following is a short summary of the findings of a Committee of Congress with reference to the relations existing between the railroad and coal companies which control the anthracite coal-fields in Pennsylvania and the coal-miners:--"Congress has found (Document No. 4) that the coal companies in the anthracite regions keep thousands of surplus labourers in hand to underbid each other for employment and for submission to all exactions; hold them purposely ignorant when the mines are to be worked and when closed, so that they cannot seek employment elsewhere; bind them as tenants by compulsion in the companies' houses, so that the rent shall run against them whether wages run or not, and under leases by which they can be turned out with their wives and children on the mountain-side in mid-winter if they strike; compel them to fill cars of larger capacity than agreed upon; make them buy their powder and other working outfit of the companies at an enormous advance on the cost; compel them to buy coal of the company at the company's price, and in many cases to buy a fixed quantity more than they need; compel them to employ the doctor named by the company and to pay him whether sick or well; 'pluck' them at the company's store, so that when pay-day comes round the company owes the men nothing, there being authentic cases where 'sober, hard-working miners toiled for years, or even a lifetime, without having been able to draw a single dollar, or but few dollars in actual cash,' in 'debt until the day they died;' refuse to fix the wages in advance, but pay them upon some hocus-pocus sliding-scale, varying with the selling price in New York, which the railway slides to suit itself; and most extraordinary of all, refuse to let the miners know the prices on which their living slides, a 'fraud,'" says the report of Congress, "on its face" (pp. 71 and 72). The companies dock the miners' output arbitrarily for slate and other impurities, and so can take from their men 5 to 50 tons more in every 100 than they pay for (p. 76). In order to keep the miners disciplined and the coal market under supplied, the railroads restrict work, so that the miners often have to live for a month on what they can earn in six or eight days,