In fine, monopolies, or competition in trade, appear to be recurrent
social phases which depend upon the ratio which the mass and the
fluidity of capital, or, in other words, its energy, bears to the area
within which competition is possible. In the Middle Ages, when the town
walls bounded that area, or when, at most, it was restricted to a few
lines of communication between defensible points garrisoned by the
monopolists,--as were the Staple towns of England which carried on the
wool trade with the British fortified counting-houses in Flanders,--a
small quantity of sluggish capital sufficed. But as police improved, and
the area of competition broadened faster than capital accumulated and
quickened, the competitive phase dawned, whose advent is marked by Darcy
_v_. Allein, decided in the year 1600. Finally, the issue between
monopoly and free trade was fought out in the American Revolution, for
the measure which precipitated hostilities was the effort of England to
impose her monopoly of the Eastern trade upon America. The Boston Tea
Party occurred on December 16, 1773. Then came the heyday of competition
with the acceptance of the theories of Adam Smith, and the political
domination in England, towards 1840, of the Manchester school of
political economy.

About forty years since, in America at least, the tide would appear once
more to have turned. I fix the moment of flux, as I am apt to do, by a
lawsuit. This suit was the Morris Run Coal Company _v._ Barclay Coal
Company,[5] which is the first modern anti-monopoly litigation that I
have met with in the United States. It was decided in Pennsylvania in
1871; and since 1871, while the area within which competition is
possible has been kept constant by the tariff, capital has accumulated
and has been concentrated and volatilized until, within this republic,
substantially all prices are fixed by a vast moneyed mass. This mass,