THE SOUL OF LONDON
a mail of gold chains, and it was a certain fortune for a costermonger to get on her soft side. For she had achieved nothing less than a "combine" of coster barrows in Southwark.
The tendency in all things is either towards the trustification of all activities or towards State and Municipal trading.[1] Into either the personal factor must enter very largely. We may suppose the grocery
- ↑ I do not wish to imply that the prospect pleases or displeases me. But the strong feeling against say Municipal Trading must disappear as soon as Trusts become universal. The Trusts may simply become the State as is the tendency in America. Or in the more likely alternative they may grow so oppressive that an outcry for State Trading will arise. In either case the individual trader will have disappeared, and with him the opposition to State Trading. The individual's sons and daughters will be simply the employees of the Trusts, and will view with indifference or with more probable favour their absorption by the State or the City in which they are interested. The third issue, the triumph of the cooperative system, will be so precisely the same in its effects on the individual worker that it may for my purposes be classed with either.
The broad fact remains that the individual worker for the time being is doomed. He has been so for a long time, in London at least. This again is most strikingly observable in the periodical press. Upon the whole that of literature makes of all the pursuits the most call for individuality. Yet ever since Cave let Johnson dine behind his screen, ever since those two started the "Gentleman's Magazine" it has become more and more essential to men of letters to live in London. And to-day it is impossible for the many of them to exist, or for the very few to grow rich without the aid of journalism in one or other of its manifestations. This means their becoming the employees of small or of very large combines. All the learned professions have for centuries now been combined with their headquarters in London. They have
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