We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject.

The belief persists that cartels are in some devious way ‘unnatural.’ Yet nothing can be further from the truth. They are but one of several kindred species of a common genus whose ancestral tree is rooted in the sanctions which underlie the modern business system as a whole. They are not strange and deformed branches ruining an otherwise symmetric tree, nor deadly fruit feeding parasitically on the benign limb. On the contrary, they are as old as the history of business enterprise, for collusion, as Adam Smith clearly recognized in his time, ‘is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things which nobody ever hears of.’