way companies in Canada, Argentina and elsewhere, the investment trust and shipping company in Africa, the land mortgage company in America, have undertaken all kinds of business and possessed themselves of every manner of property. They play into one another's hands, co-operate with each other in placing and executing orders, in furthering Empire development, and have the most intimate arrangements, alliances and agencies with and for manufacturing concerns at home.
To all intents and purposes there are in tins country five great groups of shipowners which are, in turn, reducible to two—the Cunard-P. & O.-R.M.S.P.-Ellerman group and the Furness-Withy interests. Both groups are related to each other, especially through the armament, shipbuilding, iron and steel interests. These latter are involved in all kinds of mineral ventures, whilst the soap and chemical companies are connected with the vegetable oil supply of West Africa. The shipowners, the ranching companies, the meat packers and the cold storage proprietors; the railway corporations, the land mortgage trusts, the grain elevator operators and the lumber cutters; the rubber estate owners, the tea planters, the petroleum syndicates, the news and telegraph agencies and the colonial and foreign bankers, lock and interlock in a system or systems of amazing complexity, operating, directing and safeguarding the investments of the drone class of persons who, in this and other capitalist countries, batten upon the productive enterprise of every land. They are, besides collecting the tribute of millions in far-off continents, exchanging surplus products for the infinite raw materials of which modern industry has imperative need. They are building up a vast international economy of production which will outlive the domination of their present employers, who are but the still tolerated survivals of property relationships and business arrangements which have Цесоте obsolete.
Wonderful as was the economic and social revolution brought about by the substitution almost everywhere throughout industry of the steam-driven machine for the hand-operated tool, it was but a beginning of the transformations in society and in politics which are now being carried forward by still more marvellous application of human thought to material things. Instead of the prodigal consumption of crude coal under some wasteful boiler in an inefficient stoke-hole, carefully distilled products of the col-
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