The Robber Barons (M.Josephson)

The rival banking groups sank their jealousies in the face of a common danger. The era of creation and struggle has given way to one of maintenance and conservative mastery. A well-oiled and scientifically regulated machine seems the financial system of today, in comparison with that of the first decade of the century. Ever since the turn of the century the form of our economic organization was virtually crystallized; the ownership of the means of production, the method of exploiting labor and natural resources, were fixed. To these who have known the technology of Chicago slaughterhouses and of the Carnegie Steel Co., a Henry Ford was but a projection of the immediate past. The successive periods of plethora and complacency, the intervals of tragic disillusionment, the waves of infantile reform launched by middle-road politicians, the recurrence of public corruption, financial madness and renewed crises – all this, would seem so much ironical and wearisome historical reiteration of a familiar system, did we not begin to perceive at last in this system all the fatal signs of A SHORTENING ROPE.