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motive of their conduct is to avoid the slaughter prices of cut-throat competition, the only way of doing this is to restrict the rate at which goods are put upon the market. For, if the trust or combine produced and supplied as large an aggregate of goods as the competing businesses did previously, they could not maintain selling prices at what they term 'a reasonable level.' If every market could under normal conditions be expected so to expand as to take all the goods that could be supplied, at reasonable prices, the chief plea for the economy of combination—viz. the belief in a limited market—would be invalid. I do not here pronounce upon its validity, but adduce the general testimony of capitalist trustmakers in support of the same opinion that pervades the ranks of the workers. Indeed, I would add, the practice of trusts and combines in 'regulating' i.e. reducing, output is identical in nature with the workers' 'ca' canny.'

It is not necessary to labour at great length the obvious fact that the modern policy and practice of protection draw their most powerful popular support from the belief in a limited market. Though national defence, maintenance of key industries, high wages, security of home markets, taxation of the foreigner, and other advantages are adduced in support of protective tariffs, the determining consideration is usually the belief that the productive power of the industrial world is so much in excess of the world-market that it behoves every nation to make sure at least of its own national market by keeping others out. This may not be the directly actuating motive of protec-