Then,
in due course, the Crown tried to establish its exclusive right to
grant monopolies, and finally Parliament--or King, Lords, and Commons
combined, being the whole nation in its corporate capacity,
--appropriated this monopoly of monopolies as its supreme
prerogative. And with Parliament this monopoly has ever since remained.
In fine, monopolies, or competition in trade, appear to be recurrent
social phases which depend upon the ratio which the mass and the
fluidity of capital, or, in other words, its energy, bears to the area
within which competition is possible. In the Middle Ages, when the town
walls bounded that area, or when, at most, it was restricted to a few
lines of communication between defensible points garrisoned by the
monopolists,--as were the Staple towns of England which carried on the
wool trade with the British fortified counting-houses in Flanders,--a
small quantity of sluggish capital sufficed. But as police improved, and
the area of competition broadened faster than capital accumulated and
quickened, the competitive phase dawned, whose advent is marked by Darcy
_v_.
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