It is notorious, and it is a matter upon which men dilate, that the wide and comprehensive consolidations and cooerdinations of industry, which often add so greatly to its effectiveness, take place at the initiative of the business men who are in control. It should be added that the fact of their being in control precludes such cooerdination from being effected except by their advice and consent. And it should also be added, in order to a passably complete account of the undertaker's function, that he not only can and does effect economising cooerdinations of a large scope, but he also can and does at times inhibit the process of consolidation and cooerdination. It happens so frequently that it might fairly be said to be the common run that business interests and undertaker's maneuvers delay consolidation, combination, cooerdination, for some appreciable time after they have become patently advisable on industrial grounds. The industrial advisability or practicability is not the decisive point. Industrial advisability must wait on the eventual convergence of jarring pecuniary interests and on the strategical moves of business men playing for position. Which of these two offices of the business man in modern industry, the furthering or the inhibitory, has the more serious or more far-reaching consequences is, on the whole, somewhat problematical. The furtherance of cooerdination by the modern captain of industry bulks large in our vision, in great part because the process of widening cooerdination is of a cumulative character. After a given step in cooerdination and combination has been taken, the next step takes place on the basis of the resulting situation. Industry, that is to say the working force engaged in industry, has a chance to develop new and larger possibilities to be taken further advantage of. In this way each successive move in the enhancement of the efficiency of industrial processes, or in the widening of cooerdination in industrial processes, pushes the captain of industry to a further concession, making possible a still farther industrial growth. But as regards the undertaker's inhibitory dealings with industrial cooerdination the visible outcome is not so striking. The visible outcome is simply that nothing of the kind then takes place in the premises. The potential cumulative sequence is cut off at the start, and so it does not figure in our appraisement of the disadvantage incurred. The loss does not commonly take the more obtrusive form of an absolute retreat, but only that of a failure to advance where the industrial situation admits of an advance.