In England, this step in capitalist evolution is only beginning to be taken.

In glass, paper, salt, coal, and a few other commodities, combinations more permanent than the mere Ring or Corner, and closer than the ordinary masters' unions, have been formed.

But Free Trade, which leaves us open to the less calculable and controllable element of foreign competition, and the fact that the earlier stages of concentration of capital are not yet completed here in most trades, have hitherto retarded the growth of the successful Trust in England.

Even in America there is no case where the monopoly of a Trust reigns absolute through the whole country, though many of them enjoy a local control of production and prices which is practically unrestricted.

Excepting in the case of the Standard Oil Trust, and a few less important bodies which enjoy the control of some local monopoly, such as anthracite coal, the supremacy of the leading Trust or Syndicate is brought in certain places into direct conflict with other more or less independent competing bodies.