Let me put this a little more fully. For this, after all, is the great cause that explains so much that needs explanation in the structure of our social world, in the rules that govern it, and in the habits, deplorable or otherwise, which have fastened themselves upon it. Let me speak first of banking, for by profession I am a banker. To-day the English banker and the French banker follow, in the pursuit of business, paths beaten to smooth running by the feet of their ancestors. To-day you will find in the banking world of England and of France the same rules of personal conduct and personal honour, the same principles of business nursing and business repression that you would have found a century ago. How different it is in this country! Through our early history, if you care to study it in detail, you would have found us pacing step by step the progress of England; but more than half a century ago, when this nation rejected as unsuited to its ideals the notion of a central bank, our ways divided in the banking world. From that day to this there has hardly been a single important step--until very recently--that has not carried us farther from the traditions of our English cousins. In the matter of currency, we stumbled blindly through a maze of ignorance, piling error upon error, plunging desperately from the early madness of wild-cat State currency into the preposterous and abnormal system which to-day threatens periodically the throttling of our commerce and the disruption of the business world. In the twin worlds of railroads and manufacturing, too, we blazed out paths entirely our own. Even to this day, in the face of industrial marvels here and in Germany, England clings desperately to the conditions that made her what she is. I would not dare generalize and say that the industrial world of England does not know the idea of centralization and concentration, but I will say this, that if one seek at its best the individual factory, the separate plant, the trade-mark that cannot be bought, the personal name that never can be submerged, he may go look in England for them now and he will find them, just as he would have found them a century ago. Here a new magic grew. It came not as a heaven-born inspiration to one man’s mind, but as an evolution born of the land and the air and the water. I shall dwell upon it more in a later chapter. Here it is enough merely to indicate it. It was that the individual plant and the individual name must be submerged in the combine of plants and individuals. The personal name must vanish in the trust. The trust in turn must disappear into a greater trust, and yet a greater trust--and so on until, at last, a dozen mighty combinations were gathered together into one great trust of trusts, bringing under one hand the finding, the production, the marketing, and the transportation of the raw material, and the assembling, manufacture, selling, and transportation of the finished product.