Eddy, Arthur Jerome: The new competition: an examination of the conditions underlying the radical change that is taking place in the commercial and industrial world ; the change from a competitive to a cooperative basis (New York [u.a.], 1912)

GROWTH OF CO-OPERATION

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This cooperation takes the following familiar forms:
1. Partnerships—association of individuals, the sim-
plest and most primitive form of cooperation.
2. Corporations—in reality only a legal form of a
large partnership, the chief advantage of which is the limit-
ing of the personal liability of the partners—i. e., the stock-
holders.
3. “Trusts”—as they are popularly called; they are
simply partnerships of partnerships or corporations; con-
solidations in one form or another of a number of existing
companies.
The three forms are so many steps in the evolution of
organized industry, and organized industry is absolutely es-
sential if the maximum of quantity is to be produced at a
minimum cost.
Inherently there is no objection, economic, moral, or
legal, to any one of the three forms.
A partnership of companies—the trust—is as logical and
legitimate a development of corporate organization as is
the corporation from partnerships of individuals.
The trusts do not originate anything in novel and op-
pressive competitive methods; they are rather backward
and clumsy—literally elephantine—in their attempts to do
what individuals do. They suffer from a multitude of
counselors, and those in control, however unscrupulous,
lack the decision, the alertness of the equally unscrupulous
individual in devising ways to promote his own busi-
ness.
No unfair, oppressive, or illegal practice has been
charged against a corporation or a partnership that did
not have its origin and practical demonstration in the
methods of the individual.
This is no plea for either the trust or the corporation;
it is simply a suggestion that, before we charge upon legal
entities of our own creation vices that are the common prac-