And what has the United Shoe Machinery Company to do with the Linen Thread Company? The president and the vice-president of the latter, Mr. William Barbour and Mr. A. R. Turner, are both directors in the former. Mr. Barbour, who is reputed to be the largest owner of the linen thread stock, is also a large individual stock-holder of United Shoe Machinery. Can any one doubt that such a relation has not been of importance to the Linen Thread Company in securing the 80 per cent of the linen thread business which it controls? Or would it be surprising, the power, the protection, and the surpluses of the two being given, if there soon was nobody outside of their fold making either linen thread or shoe machinery? Moreover, is not the logical and almost inevitable result of the practical monopoly of these two interwoven concerns the rapid absorption of the shoe manufacturers themselves? Why, when they own and control all machinery and linen thread, and furnish a rapidly increasing list of the findings, should they stop there? Does not the strategy of the situation, do not the same arguments, the same laws which have led to the monopoly of each and the alliance of the two, force them into shoe manufacturing? This is no new alarm. In 1901, when the New England Shoe and Leather Association made the report referred to above, it said: “The fear has been expressed that should one company control all the machinery in use in the production of shoes it would be quite easy and enormously profitable to create a trust which would be a monopoly in the shoe manufacturing business. The committee has not discovered the remotest indication of such intention. The present managers of the United Shoe Machinery Company are unusually able, experienced men, and they know that their profits are to come from coöperation with shoe manufacturers rather than competition with them.” That was true of the profits then; it is true now, but with recalcitrant manufacturers refusing to coöperate—wanting to work out their own salvation—and with funds piling up for expansion, the “good of the shoe business,” which led to the first monopoly, will probably some day point strongly to a second. There is but one force to hinder the final absorption of the shoe business by the combinations we have been considering, and it must be admitted that this is a powerful one—there is a rival trust with as rapacious a maw and as brutal a strength as any the country has produced on the trail of the shoe—that is the Beef Trust. Twenty years ago when the amiable Mr. McKinley was disposed to give the duty on hides, Mr. Blaine wrote him, “_It will yield a profit to the butcher (Beef Trust) only, the last man that needs it._” Mr. Blaine prevented the duty then—but Mr. Dingley gave it, and certainly the Beef Trust has profited as much as the shoe has suffered.