At first sight it would seem that the employers must be the most powerful class in the community, because the others can do nothing without them. So they were, a hundred years ago. The dominant man then was not the capitalist nor the landlord nor the laborer, but the employer who could set capital and land and labor to work. These employers began as office employees; for business in those days was mostly on so small a scale that any middle class employee who had learnt the routine of business as a clerk or apprentice, in his father’s office or elsewhere, and who could scrape together a few hundred pounds, could enter into partnership with another thrifty employee, and set up in almost any sort of business as an employer. But as spare money accumulated in larger and larger quantity, and enterprise expanded accordingly, business came to be done on a larger and larger scale until these old-fashioned little firms found their customers being taken away from them by big concerns and joint stock companies who could, with their huge capitals and costly machinery, not only undersell them, but make a greater profit out of their lower prices. Women see this in their shopping. They used to buy their umbrellas at an umbrella shop, their boots at a boot shop, their books at a book shop, and their lunches-out at a restaurant. Nowadays they buy them all at the same shop, lunch and all. Huge bazaars like Selfridge’s and Whiteley’s in London, and the great multiple shops in the provincial cities, are becoming the only shops where you can buy anything, because they are taking away the trade of the small separate shops and ruining the shopkeepers who kept them. These ruined shopkeepers may think themselves lucky if they get jobs in the multiple shops as shop assistants, managers of departments, and the like, when they are not too old for the change. Sometimes the change is invisible. Certain retail trades have to be carried on in small shops scattered all over the place. For example, oil shops, public houses, and tobacconists. These look like separate small businesses. But they are not. The public houses are tied houses practically owned in dozens by the brewers. A hundred oil shops or tobacco shops may belong to a single big company, called a Trust. Just as the little businesses conducted by a couple of gentlemen partners, starting with a capital which they counted in hundreds, had to give way to companies counting their capital in thousands, so these companies are being forced to combine into Trusts which count their capital in millions.