Business failures tend to become more frequent and more disastrous.

A recent French economist reckons that ten out of every hundred who enter business succeed, fifty vegetate, and forty go into bankruptcy.

In America, where internal competition is still keener and speculation more rife, it has been lately calculated that ninety-five per cent, of those who enter business "fail of success." Just as in the growth of political society the private individual has given up the right of private war to the State, with the result that as States grow stronger and better organized, the war between them becomes fiercer and more destructive, so is it with the concentration of capital.

The small capitalist, seeking to avoid the strain of personal competition, amalgamates with others, and the competition between these masses of capital waxes every day fiercer.

We have no accurate data for measuring the diminution of the number of separate competitors which has attended the growing concentration of capital, but we know that the average magnitude of a successful business is continually increasing.