Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/80

76 on a par with production and distribution—which is gathered under the one comprehensive term: modern business.

The most striking characteristic of modern business is the rapidity with which it is moving from a competitive to a cooperative basis. This is resulting, on one hand, in the "trusts" and other combinations, which furnish so much good copy for the newspaper and the congressman; on another hand, in the public service corporations, wherein quasi-public needs are supplied by quasi-private bodies; on another hand, in that genuine cooperative production and distribution with which we are less familiar than are the Europeans; and, finally, in that public ownership, pure and simple, which the modern politicians are falling over one another in their haste to promise to the people in exchange for the people's votes.

In whatever form it may appear, however, cooperation results in two things: bigness and complexity. When two men form a partnership the profits may be out of all proportion to the business paraphernalia. But when oil producers get together, and then (at the behest of Congress) unmix themselves again; when the subways, elevated roads and surface lines knit themselves into a single great transportation cobweb; when the workingmen of a whole county decide to buy their flour at a single purchase; and when forty cities and towns combine to supply themselves with water; then there result not only a bigness that has taught us to talk in billions as easily as our fathers talked in hundreds of dollars, but also a complexity which staggers us poor outsiders and, there is reason to believe, staggers the insiders as well.

The third feature of modern business, growing naturally out of the characteristics of bigness and complexity, is that profits to-day are made by the geometrical progression of innumerable small gains instead of through the adding together of a few large gains. Selling a few hundred things at a good profit in a country store in Xew York state brought in to Mr. Woolworth's employer a few thousand dollars a year. Selling millions of things for not exceeding ten cents each has enabled Mr. Woolworth himself to capitalize at $75,000,000, and to erect the highest building in the world. The mining fortunes of yesterday were made by working the richest veins and pockets, leaving the rest to waste. The mining fortunes of to-morrow will be made from the dump-heaps of abandoned plants. The day of the telescope in business, the day of seeking new worlds in order rudely to exploit their natural resources, has gone by; and the day of the microscope in business, of getting infinitesimal profits infinitely multiplied, has come. Thus far we have been a world of wasters; henceforth we are to be a world of savers, and are thus to outwit Malthus and to make the world's resources not less, but greater, by every added baby born.

A marked characteristic of modern business, consequently, is (in merchandizing) frequent "turn-overs," and (in manufacturing) the