And it is precisely the same process. We may see nearly the whole of it in this country. It begins with the colonial village, where every man owns a little land and raises his own food; also he cobbles his own shoes, spins his own wool, weaves his own cloth, and makes his own clothes. In the very earliest days, he never buys anything, because there is nothing to buy. He may be the deacon or the schoolmaster or the judge, but still he has his own farm, and any other man in the village is about as well fitted to be the deacon or the schoolmaster or the judge as he. But then his goods expand and war begins—industrial war, I mean—a horse-trade, for example. Political evolution is slow, because the rate of increase of men is limited; but the rate of increase of goods proves to be unlimited. Machines are invented, and straightway the industrial process is accelerated tenfold. It took a thousand years to evolve a monarchy; it took only a hundred to evolve a trust. The industrial units fight each other, and the strongest survive as employers, the weakest becoming employees. Then, as growth continues, these various little groups all over the country come into contact, and they struggle also. The struggle is of course no longer fighting with swords—it is underselling; but the process is exactly the same, and its purpose is the building up of a capable industrial organism. Precisely as in one case the tribes by combining find they are stronger to fight, the employers, by combining, find that they are stronger to undersell; and this process goes on until you have an industrial feudalism, corresponding in all its details to the political feudalism of France. And then, as before, the barons and the princes and the dukes fight among each other, until out of the midst arises a strong man, a Rockefeller or a Harriman, who smashes them right and left, and makes himself a king.