These changes involve another which is politically very important. When the employers had it all their own way, and were in business for themselves separately and independently, they worked with what we should call small capitals, and had no difficulty in getting them. Capital was positively thrown down their throats by the bankers, who, as we shall see later, have most of the spare money to keep. Those were the days of arrogant cotton lords and merchant princes. The man who could manage a business took every penny that was left in the till when the landlord had had his rent, the capitalist (who was often himself) his interest, and the employees their wages. If he were a capable man, what remained for him as profit was enough to make him rich enough to go into Parliament if he cared to. Sometimes it was enough to enable him to buy his way into the peerage. Capital being useless and Labor helpless without him, he was, as an American economist put it, master of the situation. When joint stock companies, which were formerly supposed to be suitable for banking and insurance only, came into business generally, the situation of the employers began to change. In a joint stock concern you have, instead of one or two capitalists, hundreds of capitalists, called shareholders, each contributing what spare money she or he can afford. It began with £100 shares, and has gone on to £10 and £1 shares; so that a single business today may belong to a host of capitalist proprietors, many of them much poorer people than could ever have acquired property in pre-company days. This had two results. One was that a woman with a £5 note to spare could allow a company to spend it, and thereby become entitled to, say, five shillings a year out of the gains of that company as long as it lasted. In this way Capitalism was strengthened by the extension of property in industry from rich people with large sums of spare money to poor people with small ones. But the employers were weakened, and finally lost their supremacy and became employees. It happened in this way. The joint stock company system made it possible to collect much larger capitals to start business with than the old separate firms could command. It was already known that the employer with a thousand pounds worth of machinery and other aids to production (called plant) could be undersold and driven out of the market by the employer with twenty thousand pounds worth. Still, employers could get twenty thousand pounds lent to them easily enough if it was believed that they could handle it profitably. But when companies came into the field equipped with hundreds of thousands of pounds, and these companies began to combine into Trusts equipped with millions, the employers were outdone. They could not raise such sums among their acquaintances. No bank would allow them to overdraw their accounts on such a gigantic scale. To get more capital, they had to turn their businesses into joint stock companies.