"Such a vast combination is a menace to the public," said the court. "It is no answer to say that this monopoly has, in fact, reduced the price of friction-matches. That policy may have been necessary to crush competition. The fact exists that it rests in the discretion of this company at any time to raise the price to an exorbitant degree." "Indeed, it is doubtful if free government can long exist in a country where such enormous amounts of money are allowed to be accumulated in the vaults of corporations, to be used at discretion in controlling the property and business of the country against the interest of the public and that of the people, for the personal gain and aggrandizement of a few individuals." Within the last thirty years, 95 per cent. of the anthracite coal of America--practically the entire supply, it was reported by Congress in 1893--has passed from the ownership of private citizens, many thousands in number, into the possession of the railroads controlling the highways of the coal-fields. These railroads have been undergoing a similar process of consolidation, and are now the property of eight great corporations. This surrender of their property by the individual coal-mine owners is a continuing process, in operation at this moment, for the complete extinction of the "individual" and the independents in this field. It is destined, according to the report of Congress of 1893,[6] to end "in the entire absorption ... of the entire anthracite coal-fields and collieries by ... the common carriers." Anthracite coal is geographically a natural monopoly contained in three contiguous fields which, if laid close together, would not cover more than eight miles by sixty. But bituminous coal, although scattered in exhaustless measures all over the continent, is being similarly appropriated by the railroads, and its area is being similarly limited artificially by their interference. "Railroad syndicates," says the investigation of 1888,[7] "are buying all the best bituminous coal lands along their lines in Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, and other Western States and Territories, no doubt with a view of levying tribute upon the people's fuel and the industrial fires of the country." Canada remains unannexed politically, but its best coal deposits have become a part of the United States. In 1892 a syndicate of American capitalists obtained the control of the principal bituminous coal-mines of Nova Scotia. Among them were men connected both with the anthracite pool and with the combination which seeks control of the oil market of Canada and of the United States.