by the Government. And in the management of its lines, the Government does not hesitate to favor particular industries or particular districts. Not to the detriment, however, of other German shippers, but to handicap foreign competition. There are fixed freight-schedules, yet nearly 63 per cent. of the rates are "special" or "exceptional," i.e. made for the particular occasion. And this flexibility is used wholly in favor of the German shipper. In other words, Germany uses her railways to promote German industry, trusts or no trusts. And in 1905 the net profit on the Prussian lines was $120,000,000 in the face of this policy.

It is natural that in a country where imperial ambition throbs so powerfully that the laws and the courts should be in complete harmony with the Government. There is, of course, no common law against monopoly or restraint of trade. There is a general corporation law, and it is, like most German laws, a model of comprehensive, scientific law-making. Under its provisions, scrupulously enforced, many of the glaring evils of the American corporation have been avoided. Stockwatering, fraudulent promoting, and secret manipulation are quite impossible under this law. But it does not in any way regulate the size of the corporation or business or the number of concerns that can be drawn together into one syndicate. I should add, however, that the German courts have declared that the cartells and syndicates must be held to a high standard of business morals, and their officers to a high degree of responsibility.

Cartells, then, are an integral part of modern German economic nationalism, not discouraged by law, favored by the Government, and nurtured by the Kaiser. With what result? A gleaming prosperity, a wondrous statistical prosperity: a prosperity superimposed upon this nation of efficiency worshippers, from the top downward.

It does not impress you as a permeating prosperity. It is not a prosperity that comes from the people, but from the favored industrial leaders. It's a mahogany prosperity, and in a nation docile to discipline this is possible. But even

here the people are beginning to protest. They have learned that Belgians are buying Westphalian coal cheaper than the German consumer; that the wire trust is selling abroad, for 115 marks, what it prices at home at 185 marks; that the nail syndicate charges the German fifty per cent. more than the foreigner; in short, that the German cartell is as expert in scientific dumping as in "scientific pricemaking."

The small dealer and small manufacturer have organized the Hansa Bund, as a protest against Big Business. Recently the women organized a revolt against the high price of meat, due to the tariff. And the workman has organized his SocialDemocratic party whose 4,250,000 voters may, at no distant day, prompt the Government to heed the consumers' point of view.

II

Turning now to England, the home of the industrial revolution and the land of free trade, we find combinations as flourishing, though of a slightly different structure, as in the hide-bound and superdisciplined land of the German.

The development of the thread industry into a great trust is so typical of the English method that I will briefly describe it. In a very modest mill in Paisley, James Coats started to manufacture sewing thread in 1826. Sons and grandsons inherited the business, together with James's genius for management, and the business grew into great magnitude. In 1890 a limited liability company (the favorite form of British corporation) was organized to take over the mills of J. & P. Coats, paying about $29,000,000 for the property, which included a mill in Pawtucket, R. I.

Meantime the chief rivals of the new combine had formed the Central Thread Agency, which took over the products of four great mills: Jonas Brook & Co., of Meltham, founded in 1810; James Chadwick and Co., of Boulton, founded 1820; Clarke & Co., of Paisley; and Kerr and Co., of Paisley. In 1895 and 1896 J. & P. Coats purchased all these concerns, and thereby became owners of mills in Canada, Russia, France, England, and Scotland. They had

sixty branch establishments, one hundred and fifty warehouses, and employed five thousand people.

Soon after this the Coats concern acquired an interest in the Fine Cotton Spinners and Doublers Association, composed of fifty or more firms spinning Sea Island cotton, with a capital of more than $37,000,000. It virtually controls the fine cotton supply. At this time J. & P. Coats raised their capital to $60,000,000 and on this amount they have faithfully paid dividends ranging from 20 per cent. to 30 per cent.

This was the prosperous condition of the Coats syndicate when the concerns that had been left out were prompted to form a combination of their own. In 1897, fourteen of these organized the English Sewing Cotton Company with $11,000,000 capital, and mills in Canada, France, and Great Britain.

In 1898, the American Thread Co. was organized with about $18,000,000 capital, absorbing thirteen concerns.

Here then are three combines of manufacturers, nearly all English, controlling the thread business of the world. Their inter-relation is made plain when it is known that J. & P. Coats took $1,000,000 of stock in the English Sewing Cotton Co., that the English Sewing Cotton Co. took the majority stock in the American Thread Co., that J. & P. Coats took $500,000 worth of preferred shares in the American. Co., and that the American Co. took 125,000 shares of the English Sewing Cotton Co's. re-issue of 1899.

There is another kind of combination popular in England which is not permitted in America. This is the pool, or loosely organized alliance, a working agreement between natural competitors for the same market to stop fighting and to unite upon a common price and on the amount of output.

For instance, in the Scotch malleable iron trade, favorably known the world over, there has been such an agreement for more than twenty-five years. As early as 1886 The Iron and Coal Trade Review, commenting upon a general rise in prices, said: "There is no combination of a hard and fast character amongst the makers,

but almost, as if by common consent, they have fallen in with the suggestion of those of their number who took the initiative in the matter. Even the largest concerns have identified themselves with this upward movement." This naïve description of one of the earliest price agreements might be completed by adding that in 1902 forty malleable iron makers of the two competing districts, Scotland and Northeastern England, entered into an agreement not to invade each other's markets.

Now this is a form of combination that is peculiarly distasteful to American law. The Sherman Law has made it an outlaw; and President Taft, as presiding judge in the Addyston Pipe case in 1898, opened the inquisition which his Administration so zealously pursued.

So in England not only the likeness of the American trust but the type of the German cartell flourishes, but it is not protected by tariffs and is therefore threatened constantly by foreign competition. Indeed, it is this constant fear of the foreigner's goods which has influenced the courts in sanctioning these combines, and has made even the Englishman, the most stubborn of individualists, resign his scruples for independence and enter into protective association with his English competitors.

As in Germany, this concentration is found in every line of industry.

And what is the policy of the courts and the Government toward this newer phase of industrialism?

The common law prohibits monopolies and combinations in restraint of trade. But the English courts have not interpreted these ancient legal maxims to mean that all combinations are per se in restraint. of trade, or monopolistic. On the contrary, the policy of the English law is to encourage competition, but it does not prohibit combination.

The leading and oft-quoted case is that of the Mogul Steamship Co. vs. McGregor, Gow & Co., et al, which found its way for final determination into the House of Lords in 1891. The defendants were a "Conference", i.e. a combination, of shipping companies, who, in their endeavor to control the Hankow tea trade, had tried

to exclude the plaintiffs from the trade by offering special rebates to those shippers who patronized the "Conference" lines exclusively. The plaintiffs claimed that the "Conference" was in restraint of trade, and, therefore, unlawful. But the House of Lords were unanimously of the other opinion, and sustained the validity of this rebate-giving shipping ring in a memorable decision which declared that the defendants "have done nothing more against the plaintiffs than pursue to the bitter end a war of competition waged in the interests of their trade," and competition, however violent, is "not contrary to public policy." Lord Justice Frey said, Lord Justice Frey said, "To draw a line between fair and unfair competition, between what is reasonable and unreasonable, passes the power of the courts." And Lord Justice Bowen found comfort that such combinations, "in a country of free trade," would not become monopolistic, and he thought that it was not "the province of judges to mould and stretch the law of conspiracy in order to keep pace with the calculations of Political Economy. If peaceable and bonest combinations of capital for purposes of trade competition are to be struck at, it must, I think, be by legislation, for I do not see that they are under the ban of the common law."

This is a very significant passage. It places the responsibility for drastic antitrust action on Parliament, not on the courts.

And what has Parliament done?

It has passed a splendid Companies' Act, which enjoins searching publicity on all corporate affairs, prohibits that most vicious of all corporate evils, stock-watering, and prevents fraudulent promoting and other crooked financial dealings which taint the records of so many of our corporations. This act permits of holding companies, and its provisions are often used for the purpose of consolidating many separate concerns into one control. No attempt is made at trust regulation.

Nor has the Government busied itself with all these rings, pools, and trusts. It has never made a general investigation of them. In 1906 a Royal Commission. looked into the affairs of shipping rings

whose influence on an island empire is naturally very great. The commission, after several years of inquiry, merely suggested the establishment of a method for settling disputes between shippers and steamship lines by arbitration.

In 1908 Sir Gilbert Parker asked the Prime Minister the following carefully worded question:

I beg to ask the Prime Minister whether he is aware of the existence in Great Britain of trusts, rings, cartells, and other combinations having for their object the monopolization of trades and markets, by regulating the output or by keeping up prices and stifling competition; and seeing that such combinations are in restraint of trade, and are, therefore, inconsistent with the present free trade policy of the country, whether he will take steps to restrain the increasing monopolistic operations of foreign trusts in the United Kingdom; and whether the Government will grant a Royal Commission or a select committee to inquire into the existence of railway conferences, shipping rings, coal rings, industrial combinations of the iron and steel trades, such as the rail-makers, syndicate, and other organizations like the Imperial Tobacco Trust, the Meat Trust, and the German Electrical Manufacturers' Trust.

To this formidable question Mr. Asquith quietly replied:

I am aware of the existence of trade combinations of the kind referred to, in the United Kingdom, and I agree that in some cases the effects of these may be prejudicial to the public interest. But the operations of such trusts are necessarily more circumscribed and less mischievous here than in other countries in which they are fostered by a general customs tariff and I doubt whether there would at the present time be any advantage in such an inquiry as the honorable member suggests.

So both the Government and the courts have

full faith in the efficiency of free trade in curbing the grosser evils of trusts, and in the common law in preventing the subtler evils of unlawful restraint, and in a sensible corporation law in protecting the public against fraud and malicious financial machi

nations.

England's experience teaches us that in a land of traditional individualists, where the channels of trade have been kept

TYPHOID

N

O STORY that has yet been written ought to send the blood tingling faster through your veins than a spirited narrative of the marvelous conquest of many maladies by the newer immunity methods. Compared with it, the exploits of Cæsar and Charlemagne, Beowulf and King Arthur, are trite and dull. Greater heroes than these by far are Jenner and Koch, Louis Pasteur, Metchnikoff and Von Behring, Kitasato and Sir Almroth E. Wright, Paul Ehrlich and Simon Flexner.

Artificial immunity is concretely explained by cowpox vaccination discovered by Jenner over a century ago. When you are vaccinated, a mild variety of cowpox is given to you. It is really a harmless and "poor relation" of smallpox. Practically the ultra-microscopic microbe of cowpox, or vaccinia as it is called, is an attenuated sort of smallpox germ. Once it is scratched, inoculated, or passed into the body, your blood begins to elaborate a principle

which attacks and overcomes these fainthearted smallpox parasites. You are well, but something has been left within you, added to your tissue juices. This is the anti-smallpox chemical which has been enlisted in your bodily army of defense, ready for many years thereafter to overcome the most virulent smallpox germs that may enter your system. The few hours of sore arm and fever that accompany vaccination have made you immune to smallpox.

Now, in this method of immunizing the normal man, calves are used as laboratories for the growth of the attenuated smallpox principle. According to several other methods, a healthful man may be immunized by transporting into his arteries the blood serum of a horse, of a sheep, of a cow, of a hog, or even of a guinea-pig that has been previously immunized. This serum contains the active anti-principle already made for the man into whose veins it goes.

If, as does happen in diphtheria and

lockjaw, the germs themselves are merely disturbing objects that remain in the throat or in a nail wound, and the poisons they make cause the respective diseases, it is the poisons and not the germ which makes the animal produce an anti-poison. Hence lockjaw and diphtheria immunity is brought about by injecting into people the serum taken from the jugular veins of horses that have received steadily increasing doses of germ poisons or toxins. This serum is named commercially anti-toxin. Human beings injected with lockjaw and diphtheria anti-toxins are immune to those ailments.

The staphylococcus is a tiny bacterium not unlike the dot or period that ends this sentence. It is an old offender of microbe misdemeanors, as the common cause of pimples, boils, carbuncles, sores, catarrhs, and other simple festerings. It is found in the air, on the ground, and upon everybody's skin. As ubiquitous as dust, it is lurking about always ready to seize an undue advantage of mankind.

Now we all are in danger of boils, pimples, and skin infections, so it occurred to Sir Almroth E. Wright that prevention of these dangers was worth many pounds of treatment after the trouble started. What could be done about it? He evolved the following discovery, which has proved to be eminently practical and successful.

He planted a colony of staphylococci in sterilized beef tea. After they had grown and multiplied for one day in an incubator, the billions of newly developed cocci were killed by heat and a drop of carbolic acid and measured. This is not a difficult procedure. Fifteen drops of beef tea diluted accurately were thus made to equal one hundred million staphylococci. Dr. Wright was then prepared to inject his hundred million dead germs - these are called vaccines into himself and other volunteers, and then to test his immunity toward staphylococcic maladies. He soon discovered that five hundred million dead cocci given hypodermically and repeated twice ten days later with a thousand million, and another similar interval to be followed with the same dose, produced an immunity to boils and sores that lasted several years.

Vaccination with killed cocci, to prevent these skin infections, is now carried on extensively all over the world. Some surgeons now immunize their patients before operating upon them, while dermatologists are never without a good supply of staphylococci vaccine in their offices.

The venom of various snakes, such as the cobra, rattlesnake, water-moccasin, and certain sea snakes, has been collected and converted, by immunizing horses, into antivenin. venin. It requires repeated inoculations over a period of six months to immunize a horse. Dr. Noguchi of the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research has produced the most successful anti-rattlesnake venom. It protects completely from the poison.

No disease, however, has been dealt a more dramatic blow by artificial immunity than typhoid fever. This baneful malady, that has raged through the ages in all the countries of the world, has at last succumbed to a preventive vaccine, although once it has developed it is still resistant to every known scheme of treatment.

As far back as 1896, Sir Almroth E. Wright obtained pure family strains of the typhoid bacillus from soldiers ill with "enteric" fever, and planted them in clean, well-boiled bouillon. After these had developed into a typhoid progeny of quadrillions, tiny glass tubes were filled each with five hundred million typhoid germs that had been previously killed. Then the officers of several British regiments stationed in India and South Africa were given one or two hypodermic inoculations of dead typhoid microbes. Although the method was crude the effects that followed were most striking.

Among the troops inoculated only 50 per cent. became infected as compared with those who had received no dead typhoid germs. Moreover, the vaccinated soldiers remained thus protected for three years. The fragmentary and crude procedure thus carried out was, during the next six or eight years, worked out to its present perfection. Sir A. E. Wright first replaced his original single injection with two doses of killed typhoid germs at 14-day intervals. Two years ago, the scheme of immunizing healthy persons to typhoid