quent intervals during the remainder of the century. The failure of all such legislation is, however, in no wise mysterious. One who has even a superficial acquaintance with our own economic society must understand how the influence of great wealth in that day could make itself felt, through fear or favor, by every class, with a pressure as penetrating as that of the atmosphere. Many of the monopolists held places in the councils of cities or of princes; other officials were induced to make advantageous investments with the companies, or were purchased outright. - Of all these great trading combinations, the most famous was an attempt in 1498 at cornering copper. It united the resources of the Fuggers, the Herwarts, the Gossenbrots, and the Paumgar tens, a proportion of the world's capital which few syndicates of the present day have been able to command. Yet it failed. By the terms of the agreement, which is still extant, each of the associates was bound to procure a certain weight of Hungarian and Tyrolese copper, and bring it to the great market in Venice, where the metal was to be sold for the profit of the partners, at prices between an agreed maximum and minimum, expenses being shared in proportion to the several holdings. Ulrich Ulrich Fugger and his brothers were to act alone trustees" in managing the sale of the common stock. The Fuggers were soon eager to abandon the enterprise. In little more than a year from the first agreement they sold out to their partners, receiving for their copper only thirty-six and one third ducats per unit of weight, although the lowest price allowed under the original contract was forty-three ducats. They agreed to abstain from hampering their former associates by entering the Venetian market before the syndicate had disposed of its stock, but promptly offered a quantity of copper for sale in Venice, through their associates, the Thurzi, and justified them as 66 selves by asserting that they were not forbidden to sell copper, and could not prevent its then going to Venice. The enterprise as a whole was defeated by the abundant production of copper in Hungary, which made it impossible to maintain prices. Dr. Conrad Peutinger, of Augsburg, was appealed to for a decision between the parties in their quarrel. He condemned the Fuggers for their treachery, but affirmed the legitimacy of the pool by use of the distinction so familiar to-day between reasonable and unreasonable prices. The copper was to be sold quickly at a moderate price (a maximum having been fixed upon as well as a minimum), and the agreement was therefore not injurious to the public. The permanent significance of the whole enterprise was expressed by Peutinger, a few years later, in the conclusion that a monopoly of copper is impossible, because the source of supply is indefinitely great. Disaster more dreadful befell the Hoechstetters in an attempt at cornering quicksilver, a seemingly light task, as the metal came chiefly from a single small district in the Austrian dominions. A monopoly at this source was in fact secured, but the discovery of new deposits in Spain and Hungary entailed not merely the failure of that enterprise, but the utter ruin of the Hoechstetter house. Similarly, the Meyers of Augsburg are said to have expiated, by the loss of twenty casks of gold, their indiscretion in attempting a corner in tin. The family of the Welsers, which had been famous in war and peace for nearly seven glorious centuries, yielded to the baleful fascination of similar projects, and history has had no further concern with the broken house of Welser. Elector August of Saxony entered into an association for monopolizing pepper as well as a great variety of drugs and spices. In the wreck which followed, two of his partners took refuge in suicide, while the elector himself gained The prudence, which he exhibited in later years by resisting like temptation from other venturesome spirits. The monopolies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries probably caused occasional hardship, when articles for sale in local markets were bought up and held at advanced prices; but the commodities most commonly dealt in were not those of indispensable use. Luxuries of foreign origin were most frequently chosen for attempts at monopoly; and with regard to these, it is not difficult to argue in justification of agreements to secure high prices. The commerce of that time was beset with dangers by land and sea, and its losses occasionally fell with terrible force upon the trader. High prices were needed to compensate for these losses, by way of insurance. The points of resemblance between the industrial combinations of that time and this are sufficiently obvious, and the points of unlikeness are no less easy to indicate. Not only were the grounds of complaint against them the same then as now, but the division between those who fiercely condemned and those who partially or quite condoned the action of the companies followed then, as it does in America to-day, a sectional line. The "populism" of that generation had its home in Germany, which was still new in its industrial greatness. There lay the European "wild west; " there the rural population still contributed powerfully to public opinion, and there the denunciation of monopolies was the loudest; while in Italy — industrially more mature — the urban influence was predominant, and the capitalistic régime was regarded with entire complacency. What we call trusts - combinations of manufacturers, like the Nuremberg beer combine were merely local in the earlier period; capital had not accumulated in sufficient amount, and there was too little communication between towns to allow a wide consolidation. The monopolies of spectacular size were commer cial monopolies, "corners." Yet the one great generalization deducible from one period holds also of the other. Corners in a world market rarely, if ever, succeed; the relatively successful combinations are the trusts in which protection against competition is, in some degree, secured by the control of highly specialized and costly appliances for production, as in the sugar trust, or (what is essentially the same thing) of appliances for transportation, like the pipe lines of the great oil company. About the close of the sixteenth century, the opinion was pretty generally accepted that attempts at commercial monopoly were unprofitable. The great capitalists abandoned a form of enterprise which had been discredited by continued failure, and turned their attention to banking operations. It is possible, however, that the monopolies of the sixteenth century might have been more successful if the experiment had been allowed to work itself out unhampered. The ventures of this class which are best known to us failed not wholly because of any necessary impracticability of their their hazardous life ("How right was that dominion; Madeira, the Azores, Amerpoet who called sailors wretched!"), hadica, and the Cape were discovered or reno better devices for determining their discovered. own position or directing their pathway in the water than those of the fabulous ages when Ulysses wandered blindly on his raft, "gazing on the Pleiads, on Bootes which sets late, and on the Bear which men also call Wagon," and from these guessing helplessly, without knowledge for exact calculation, without compass or chart, "some god our guide." When the fourteenth century ended, to pass far from familiar landmarks was still as then to lose one's self. Shipbuilding lagged in less degree. Ships were so small and fragile that merchants went in small numbers, and fearfully, beyond Gibraltar and up into the rough northern waters, which were fit only for Scandinavian pirates, who attached no value to human life. In the fifteenth century, almost at a stroke navigation became a science: the compass came into common use; charts were made to exhibit sea routes; and, with the invention of new instruments and new methods for calculation, the determination of a ship's position by means of the sun and stars changed from guesswork to certainty. Vessels were enlarged, their models given new and stronger lines; masts were lengthened and sail space was increased. The danger of losing one's way on the sea was removed, and the chances of shipwreck on an ocean voyage were greatly diminished. The ocean became part of man's As a highway, the ocean was now not only possible, but preferable; for it is a simple fact of physics that a vehicle moves with less friction, and thus less expenditure of effort, on water than over the best roadways. The ancient roads through Germany and over the Alps were now hardly more than superfluous; their service of communication between north and south, Europe and the Orient, was usurped by the ocean water ways, and the invigorating stream of the world's trade once again swept along the circumference of Europe, fertilizing with its deposits, like another Nile, France, England, and the Netherlands. Grass grew in the streets of German towns, where once the morning and evening tramp of workmen had been compared to the march of great armies. The beggar replaced the merchant prince. Even the country districts declined, and in some places money went out of use, and the primitive method of barter reappeared, while a moderate serfdom gave way to downright slavery. Germany, as one of her own historians says, became the "Cinderella of nations." Germany was a "swamp," said Goethe. The Fugger dwindled; the Welser could no longer withstand the shocks of trade. Capital in abundance and highly perfected business organization, which had made great corporations and combinations possible, disappeared in the general ruin. Ambrose Paré Winston. VII.2 AUDREY.1 THE RETURN OF MONSIEUR JEAN HUGON. sec To the north the glebe was bounded by a thick wood, a rank and dense " ond growth" springing from earth where had once stood, decorously apart, the monster trees of the primeval forest; a wild maze of young trees, saplings and undergrowth, overrun from the tops of the slender, bending pines to the bushes of dogwood and sassafras, and the rotting, ancient stumps and fallen logs, by the uncontrollable, all-spreading vine. It was such a fantastic thicket as one might look to find in fairyland, thorny and impenetrable here as tall as a ten years' pine, there sunken away to the height of the wild honeysuckles; everywhere backed by blue sky, heavy with odors, filled with the flash of wings and the songs of birds. To the east the thicket fell away to low and marshy grounds, where tall cypresses grew, and myriads of myrtle bushes. Later in the year women and children would venture in upon the unstable earth for the sake of the myrtle berries and their yield of fragrant wax, and once and again an outlying slave had been tracked by men and dogs to the dark recesses of the place; but for the most part it was given over to its immemorial silence. To the south and the west the tobacco fields of Fair View closed in upon the glebe, taking the fertile river bank, and pressing down to the crooked, slow-moving, deeply shadowed creek, upon whose further bank stood the house of the Rev. Gideon Darden. A more retired spot, a completer se questration from the world of mart and highway, it would have been hard to find. In the quiet of the early morning, when the shadows of the trees lay across the dewy grass, and the shadows of the clouds dappled the limpid water, it was an angle of the earth as cloistral and withdrawn as heart of scholar or of anchorite could wish. On one side of the house lay a tiny orchard, and the windows of the living room looked out upon a mist of pink and white apple blooms. The fragrance of the blossoms had been in the room, but could not prevail against the odor of tobacco and rum lately introduced by the master of the house and minister of the parish. Audrey, sitting beside a table which had been drawn in front of the window, turned her face aside, and was away, sense and soul, out of the meanly furnished room into the midst of the great bouquets of bloom, with the blue between and above. Darden, walking up and down, with his pipe in his mouth, and the tobacco smoke curling like an aureole around his bullet head, glanced toward the window and the girl's averted head and idle hands. "When you have written that which I have told you to write, say so, Audrey," he commanded. "Don't sit there staring at nothing!" Audrey came back to the present with a start, took up a pen, and drew the standish nearer. "Answer of Gideon Darden, Minister of Fair View Parish, in Virginia, to the several Queries contained in my Lord Bishop of London's Circular Letter to the Clergy in Virginia," she read, and poised her pen in air. "Read out the questions," ordered Darden, "and write my answer to each in the space beneath. No blots, mind 1 Copyright, 1901, by MARY JOHNSTON. 2 A summary of the preceding chapters may be found on the fifth advertising page in the front of the magazine. you, and spell not after the promptings of your woman's nature.” Going to a side table, he mixed for himself, in an old battered silver cup, a generous draught of bombo; then, with the drink in his hand, walked heavily across the uncarpeted floor to his armchair, which creaked under his weight as he sank into its leathern lap. He put down the rum and water with so unsteady a hand that the liquor spilled, and when he refilled his pipe half the contents of his tobacco box showered down upon his frayed and ancient and unclean coat and breeches. From the pocket of the latter he now drew forth a silver coin, which he balanced for a moment upon his fat forefinger, and finally sent spinning across the table to Audrey. ""Tis the dregs of thy guinea, child, that Paris and Hugon and I drank at the crossroads last night. Burn me,' says I to them, if that long-legged lass of mine shan't have a drop in the cup!' And says Hugon "— What Hugon said did not appear, or was confided to the depths of the tankard which the minister raised to his lips. Audrey looked at the splendid shilling gleaming upon the table beside her, but made no motion toward taking it into closer possession. A little red had come into the clear brown of her cheeks. She was a young girl, with her dreams and fancies, and the golden guinea would have made a dream or two come true. "Query the first,'" she read slowly. "How long since you went to the plantations as missionary?'" Darden, leaning back in his chair, with his eyes uplifted through the smoke clouds to the ceiling, took his pipe from his mouth, for the better answering of his diocesan. “My Lord, thirteen years come St. Swithin's day,'" he dictated. "Signed, Gideon Darden.' Audrey, do not forget thy capitals. Thirteen years! Lord, Lord, the years, how they fly! Hast it down, Audrey?" Audrey, writing in a slow, fair, clerkly hand, made her period, and turned to the Bishop's second question: "Had you any other church before you came to that which you now possess?'" "No, my Lord,'" said the minister to the Bishop; then to the ceiling: "I came raw from the devil to this parish. Audrey, hast ever heard children say that Satan comes and walks behind me when I go through the forest?" “Yes,” said Audrey, “but their eyes are not good. You go hand in hand.” Darden paused in the lifting of his tankard. "Thy wits are brightening, Audrey; but keep such observations to thyself. It is only the schoolmaster with whom I walk. Go on to the next question." The Bishop desired to know how long the minister addressed had been inducted into his living. The minister addressed, leaning forward, laid it off to his Lordship how that the vestries in Virginia did not incline to have ministers inducted, and, being very powerful, kept the poor servants of the Church upon uneasy seats; but that he, Gideon Darden, had the love of his flock, rich and poor, gentle and simple, and that in the first year of his ministry the gentlemen of his vestry had been pleased to present his name to the Governor for induction. Which explanation made, the minister drank more rum, and looked out of the window at the orchard and at his neighbor's tobacco. "You are only a woman, and can hold no office, Audrey,” he said, “but I will impart to you words of wisdom whose price is above rubies. Always agree with your vestry. Go, hat in hand, to each of its members in turn, craving advice as to the management of your own affairs. Thunder from the pulpit against Popery, which does not exist in this colony, and the Pretender, who is at present in Italy. Wrap a dozen black sheep of inferior breed in white sheets and set them arow at the church door, |