“It would appear from evidence collected by the Interstate Commerce Commission and communicated to the Senate, that the ownership of the railroad system of this country is not as widely diffused as has been supposed. On the 30th of June, 1904, the 1,220 railroads reporting to the Commission had only 327,851 stockholders of record. This total includes many duplications, as it was impossible to know in how many instances one capitalist was represented in the stockholding interest of several railroads. Assuming the population of the United States to be, in round figures, eighty millions, the entire mileage of the railroads doing an interstate business is owned by about four-tenths of 1 per cent. of the people of this country.” Such is the situation. It completes our view of the process of Industrial Evolution, so far as it has progressed up to date. The condition is like that of an oak tree planted in a jar, or a chick developing within its shell; the indefinite continuance of the process is inconceivable. What form the collapse will assume, and when it may be expected to occur, is the problem next to be taken up. CHAPTER VI THE REVOLUTION One is at a great disadvantage just at present in picturing an industrial crisis. We are at the very flood-tide of prosperity; the railroads are paralysed by the volume of the country’s business; the coal mines cannot furnish the coal, and the farmers are burning their grain because they cannot get it to market; the steel trust has orders for two years ahead—and so on without limit. I have to ask the reader to picture interest rates going down to zero, at a time when they are higher than they have been in a decade; I have to ask him to picture too much of everything in the country, at a time when there is not enough of anything. And yet all this excess of “prosperity” is an integral part of the phenomenon we are studying. If the process of wealth-concentration and overproduction of capital went on unmodified by any other factor, we should witness a gradual rise in the price of commodities, a gradual increase in the number of unemployed, and a gradual fall in the rates of interest. As it happens, however, the movement proceeds in rhythmic pulses, like the swinging of a pendulum, or the ebbing and flowing of the tide. This is owing to the factor of credit-expansion, which we have still to interpret. We have pictured Capital, ubiquitous, endlessly resourceful, incessantly alert—“clamouring for dividends.” Competition is a forcing-process by which every device that will increase profits is driven into general use, and subjected to its maximum strain. The most obvious of these devices is that of credit.