ABSTRACT

A trust, as that term is colloquially understood, is a business organization. A shrewd interpretation might, without particular violence to the facts, find a coalition of forces of the kind which is later known as a Trust in the Barbarian raids spoken of as the Volkeru.randerung. The beginnings of a bona fide trust enterprise are of a more businesslike character and have left a record more amenable to the tests of accountancy. The trust's policy was substantially the same as has since become familiar in other lines of enterprise, with the difference that in those early days the competitive struggle took a less sophisticated form. Outstanding syndicates and private firms were given the alternative of submission to the trust's terms or retirement from the traffic. The trust having become an international power, it undertook to shape the destiny of nations and dynasties, and it broke under the strain.