The interindustrial and international trustification of industry shows a remarkable fulfillment of the law of capitalist concentration which the Socialists were the first to formulate; the existence of petty industries and businesses, or their numerical increase even, being a relatively insignificant matter compared with the enormous increase in large industries and businesses, and their share in the total volume of industry and commerce. In agriculture, concentration, while it does not proceed so rapidly or directly as in manufacture and commerce, and while it takes directions and forms unforeseen by the Socialists of a generation ago, proceeds surely nevertheless. Along with this concentration of capital and industry proceeds the concentration of wealth into proportionately fewer hands. While a certain diffusion of wealth takes place through the mechanism of capitalist concentration, by developing a new class of highly salaried officials, and enabling numerous small investors to own shares in great industrial and commercial corporations, it is not sufficient to balance the expropriation which goes on in the competitive struggle, and it is true that a larger proportion of the national wealth is owned by a minority of the population than ever before, that minority being proportionately less numerous than ever before. Further, the peculiar financial organization of modern capitalist society enables the ruling capitalists to control and use to their own advantage the wealth of others invested in industrial and commercial corporations. Thus to the concentration of ownership must be added the concentration of control, which plays an increasingly important part in capitalist economics.
Whatever defects there may be in the Marxian theory, as outlined by Marx himself, and whatever modifications of his statement of it may be rendered necessary by changed conditions, in its main and essential features it has successfully withstood all the criticisms which have been directed against it. Economic literature is full of prophecies, but in its whole range there is not an instance of prophecy more literally and abundantly fulfilled than that which Marx made concerning the trend of capitalist development. And Karl Marx was not a prophet--he but read clearly the meaning of certain facts which others had not learned to read, the law of social dynamics. That is not prophecy, but science.