pete with the magnates of capital, are willing to nibble at their schemes in the hope of finding some profitable employment for the remnants of their former fortunes or their savings.
Then comes the panic or the "contraction" and all the bubbles burst, leaving the field strewn with the corpses of the small fry, the would-be-capitalists despite the fact that their means were insufficient to give them standing as capitalists individually. Another and very important aspect of this phenomenon will be considered later in another connection. Here we simply want to point out the fact that the corporation is not merely a means of permitting the small capitalists to participate in the economic undertakings which they could not tackle on their own account, but also of relieving them of their small capitals, and either wasting them or transferring them to the large capitalists, directly or indirectly. This was pointed out at the beginning of the discussion by Kautsky, and since then we have had abundant proof of the great possibilities of this relieving process. The exposures of Thomas W. Lawson have shown that the very loftiest pillars of capitaldom engage in this relieving process, not merely as an incident to the natural "expansion" and "contraction" of the commercial world, but deliberately, with malice aforethought, manufacturing to order "expansion" and "contraction" in order to accelerate the relieving process. These exposures have also shown that where the small fry do not nibble themselves in propria persona, their bankers, savings banks and other depositaries do it for them, as if they were vying with each other. to prove the correctness of the Marxian prognosis.
It must not be assumed, however, that this relieving process is due entirely to dishonesty on the part of the big sharks of capitalism in dealing with their weaker brethren. On the contrary, the process itself is a natural one, due to the natural workings of the corporation. This process is only accelerated by the exposed "evils," by the abuses of the corporate form of doing business, for there are natural, as
