Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 136, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 June 1910 — SOME INTERESTING STATISTICS. [ARTICLE]

SOME INTERESTING STATISTICS.

What Combination In Doing; for the Independent Merchant. Shall we take restaurant keeping? The Standard Oil interests control one “chain” of restaurants and the American Tobacco interests control another. Or printing? One house in itfew York Issues and prints twenty periodicals, and the small independent printer, lib the small independent is disappearing. _< ■" ~ Milk? The Standard Oil interests own the Milk Trust. Foundries or iron works? The Steel Trust looks after them. Tobacco? The United Cfgar Stores Company owns about six hundred retail stores and will own many more when the present chances of litigation are removed. Machinery? Largely controlled by institutions like the American Shoe Manufacturing Trust, a particularly vicious form of these combinations. Men’s clothing? Passing into the “chain” system. One company owns thirty-seven clothing stores in the West. Banks? Owned or controlled chiefly by the Standard Oil, Morgan or Beef Trust “chains.” Butcher shops? Under process of absorption through the absorbed grocery stores, or becoming practically the agencies for the Beef Trust. The department stores constantly increase in number and in size.

What does that mean? It means that the men that in a past generation would have been independent merchants are now the employes of these stores, and never can be anything else; employes on wages with time checks, lines, and their daily work dependent upon a manager’s caprice. That is their prospect in life. It is hard (in some of its aspects), and we dislike to admit it, but it is the tnith. The gigantic department stores and mail order houses are built of the ruins of independent stores, just as the Christian churches of Rome were built of the fragments of the old temples, and each independent store destroyed is an independent merchant turned into a salaried employe.— Charles Edward Russell in Success Magazine.