The same is true of the field as a whole. Things harmless in England might be very dangerous in America. We have so far considered the trust power only as a commercial and industrial factor--in its tendency, by crystallisation or consolidation in the higher strata, to depress the economic status of the industrial masses and to make the emergence of the individual trader into independence more difficult. In this aspect capital is immensely more dominant in England than in America. But there is a political side to the problem. In the United States, owing to the absence of a throne and an established aristocracy, there is, as it were, no counterpoise to the power of wealth. This is, in practice, the chief virtue of the throne in the British constitution, that, in its capacity as the Fountain of Honour, it prevents wealth from becoming the dominant power in the country and thereby (which Americans are slow to understand) is the most democratic of forces, protecting the proletariat in some measure against the possibility of unhindered oppression by an omnipotent capitalism. The English masses are already by the mere impenetrability of the commercial structure above them much worse off than the corresponding masses in the United States. What their condition might be if for a generation the social restraint put upon wealth by the power of the throne and the established aristocracy were to be relaxed, it is not pleasant to consider. Nor need it be considered.[335:1] It is, I think, evident that in America the danger to the industrial independence of the individual which might arise from the aggregation of wealth in a few hands is much greater than in England. The power would be capable of greater abuse; the evils which would flow from such abuse would be greater. It is not wealth, but the abuse of it that he is attacking, says President Roosevelt--not the wealthy class, but the "wealthy criminal class." The distinction has not been digested by those in England who rail against American methods or who write of American politics. It is necessary--or so it seems to a large number of the American people--that extraordinary checks should be put upon the possibility of the abuse of wealth in the United States, such as do not exist or are not needed (or at least we have heard no energetic demand for them) in England. As a political fact there is need of especial vigilance in the United States lest corporate power be abused. As a commercial fact it is merely preposterous to rail at the modern tendency to consolidation and amalgamation as specifically "American."