ABSTRACT
The structure of modern Capitalism tends to throw an ever-increasing power into the hands of the men who operate the monetary machinery of industrial communities, the financial class. For large enterprises the financier has always been a necessary man: in the ancient and the mediæval world he found large sums of money to meet the emergencies of kings and great nobles, ecclesiastical or civil, to furnish military or naval expeditions, and to facilitate the larger forms of commercial enterprises which needed capital. Small financiers, as usurers or money-lenders, have at all times lived upon the irregularities and misfortunes of the farming, artisan, and small trading classes. But not until the development of modern industrial methods required a large, free, various low of capital into many channels of productive employment did the financier show signs of assuming the seat of authority he now occupies in our economic system. Every important step which we have traced in the growth of industrial structure has favoured the segregation of a financial from a more general capitalist class, and has given it a larger and a more profitable control over the course of industry.
