Perhaps the growing power of the labor unions had its effect upon those noble minds, the judiciary. The worker was no longer detached from his fellow workmen: he could no longer be scornfully shoved aside as a weak, helpless individual. He now had the strength of association and organization. The possibility of such strength transferred to politics affrighted the ruling classes. Where before this, the politicians had contemptuously treated the worker's petitions, certain that he could always be led blindly to vote the usual partisan tickets, it now dawned upon them that it would be wiser to make an appearance of deference and to give some concessions which, although of a slight character, could be made to appear important. The Workingmen's party of 1829 had shown a glimmer of what the worker could do when aroused to class-conscious action.

CAJOLING THE LABOR VOTE.

Now it was that the politicians began the familiar policy of "catering to the labor vote." Some rainbow promises of what they would do, together with a few scraps of legislation now and then— this constituted the bait held out by the politicians. That adroit master of political chicanery, President Van Buren, hastened to issue an executive order on April 10, 1840, directing the establishment of a ten-hour day, between April and September, in the navy yards. From the last day of October, however, until March 31, the "working hours will be from the rising to the setting of the sun"—a length of time equivalent, meal time deducted, to about ten hours.

The political trick of throwing out crumbs to the workers long proved successful. But it was supplemented by other methods. To draw the labor leaders away from a hostile stand to the established political parties, and to prevent the massing of workers in a party of their own, the politicians began an insidious system of bribing these leaders to turn traitors. This was done by either appointing them to some minor political office or by giving them money. In many instances, the labor unions in the ensuing decades were grossly betrayed.

Finally, the politicians always had large sums of election funds contributed by merchants, bankers, landowners, railroad owners—by all parts of the capitalist class. These funds were employed in corrupting the electorate and legislative bodies. Caucuses and primaries were packed, votes bought, ballot boxes stuffed and election returns falsified. It did not matter to the corporations generally which of the old political parties was in power; some manufacturers or merchants might be swayed to one side or the other for the self-interest involved in the reenactment of the protective tariff or the establishment of free trade; but, as a rule, the corporations, as a matter of business, contributed money to both parties.

THE BASIS OF POLITICAL PARTIES.

However these parties might differ on various issues, they both stood for the perpetuation of the existing social and industrial system based upon capitalist ownership. The tendency of the Republican party, founded in 1856, toward the abolition of negro chattel slavery was in precise harmony with the aims and fundamental interests of the manufacturing capitalists of the North. The only peril that the capitalist class feared was the creation of a distinct, disciplined and determined workingmen's party. This they knew would, if successful, seriously endanger and tend to sweep away the injustices and oppressions upon which they, the capitalists, subsisted. To avert this, every ruse and expedient was resorted to: derision, undermining, corruption, violence, imprisonment—all of these and other methods were employed by that sordid ruling class claiming for itself so pretentious and all-embracing a degree of refinement, morality and patriotism.

Surveying historical events in a large way, however, it is by no means to be regretted that capitalism had its own unbridled way, and that its growth was not checked. Its development to the unbearable maximum had to come in order to prepare the ripe way for a newer stage in civilization. The capitalist was an outgrowth of conditions as they existed both before, and during, his time. He fitted as appropriate a part in his time as the predatory baron in feudal days.

But in this sketch we are not dealing with historical causes or sequences as much as with events and contrasts. The aim is to give a sufficient historical perspective of times when Government was manipulated by the capitalist class for its own aggrandizement, and to despoil and degrade the millions of producers.

The imminence of working-class action was an ever present and disturbing menace to the capitalists. To give one of many instances of how the workers were beginning to realize the necessity of this action, and how the capitalists met it, let us instance the resolutions of the New England Workingmen's Association, adopted in 1845. With the manifold illustrations in mind of how the powers of Government had been used and were being increasingly used to expropriate the land, the resources and the labor and produce of the many, and bond that generation and future generations under a multitude of law-created rights and privileges, this association declared in its preamble:

Whereas, we, the mechanics and workingmen of New England are convinced by the sad experience of years that under the present arrangement of society labor is and must be the slave of wealth; and, whereas, the producers of all wealth are deprived not merely of its enjoyment, but also of the social and civil rights which belong to humanity and the race; and, whereas, we are convinced that reform of those abuses must depend upon ourselves only; and, whereas, we believe that in intelligence alone is strength, we hereby declare our object to be union for power, power to bless humanity, and to further this object resolve ourselves into an association.

One of the leading spirits in this movement was Charles A. Dana, a young professional man of great promise and exceptional attainments. Subsequently he was bought off with a political office; he became not only a renegade of the most virulent type, but he leagued himself with the greatest thieves of the day—Tweed and Jay Gould, for example—received large bribes for defending them and their interests in a newspaper of which he became the owner—the New York Sun —and spent his last years bitterly and cynically attacking, ridiculing and misrepresenting the labor movement, and made himself the most conspicuous editorial advocate for every thieving plutocrat or capitalist measure.

The year 1884 about marked the zenith of the era of the capitalist seizing of the public domain. By that time the railroad and other corporations had possessed themselves of a large part of the area now vested in their ownership. At that very time an army of workers, estimated at 2,000,000, was out of employment. Yet it was not considered a panic year; certainly the industrial establishments of the country were not in the throes of a commercial cataclysm such as happened in 1873 and previous periods. The cities were overcrowded with the destitute and homeless; along every country road and railroad track could be seen men, singly or in pairs, tramping from place to place looking for work.

Many of those unemployed were native Americans. A large number were aliens who had been induced to migrate by the alluring statements of the steamship companies to whose profit it was to carry large batches; by the solicitations of the agents of American corporations seeking among the oppressed peoples of the Old World a generous supply of cheap, unorganized labor; or by the spontaneous prospect of bettering their condition politically or economically.

Millions of poor Europeans were thus persuaded to come over, only to find that the promises held out to them were hollow. They found that they were exploited in the United States even worse industrially than in their native country. As for political freedom their sanguine hopes were soon shattered. They had votes after a certain period of residence, it was true, but they saw—or at least the intelligent of them soon discerned—that the personnel and laws of the United States Government were determined by the great capitalists. The people were allowed to go through the form of voting; the moneyed interests, by controlling the machinery of the dominant political parties, dictated who the candidates, and what the so-called principles, of those parties should be. The same program was witnessed at every election. The electorate was stimulated with excitement and enthusiasm over false issues and dominated candidates. The more the power and wealth of the capitalist class increased, the more openly the Government became ultra-capitalistic.

WEALTH AND THE SWAY OF DIRECT POWER

It was about this time that the Senate of the United States was undergoing a transformation clearly showing how impatient the great capitalists were of operating Government through middlemen legislators. Previously, the manufacturing, railroad and banking interests had, on the whole, deemed it wise not to exercise this power directly but indirectly. The representatives sent to Congress were largely lawyers elected by their influence and money. The people at large did not know the secret processes back of these legislators. The press, advocating, as a whole, the interests of the capitalist class, constantly portrayed the legislators as great and patriotic statesmen.

But the magnates saw that the time had arrived when some empty democratic forms of Government could be waved aside, and the power exercised openly and directly by them. Presently we find such men as Leland Stanford, of the Pacific railroad quartet, and one of the arch-bribers and thieves of the time, entering the United States Senate after debauching the California legislature; George Hearst, a mining magnate, and others of that class.

More and more this assumption of direct power increased, until now it is reckoned that there are at least eighty millionaires in Congress. Many of them have been multimillionaires controlling, or representing corporations having a controlling share in vast industries, transportation and banking systems—men such as Senator Elkins, of West Virginia; Clark, of Montana; Platt and Depew, of New York; Guggenheim, of Colorado; Knox, of Pennsylvania; Foraker, of Ohio, and a quota of others. The popular jest as to the United States Senate being a "millionaires' club" has become antiquated; much more appropriately it could be termed a "multimillionaires' club." While in both houses of Congress are legislators who represent the almost extinguished middle class, their votes are as ineffective as their declamations are flat. The Government of the United States, viewing it as an entirety, and not considering the impotent exceptions, is now more avowedly a capitalist Government than ever before. As for the various legislatures, the magnates, coveting no seats in those bodies, are content to follow the old plan of mastering them by either direct bribery or by controlling the political bosses in charge of the political machines.

Since the interests of the capitalists from the start were acutely antagonistic to those of the workers and of the people in general from whom their profits came, no cause for astonishment can be found in the refusal of Government to look out, even in trifling ways, for the workers' welfare. But it is of the greatest and most instructive interest to give a succession of contrasts. And here some complex factors intervene. Those cold, unimpassioned academicians who can perpetuate fallacies and lies in the most polished and dispassionate language, will object to the statement that the whole of governing institutions has been in the hands of thieves—great, not petty, thieves. And yet the facts, as we have seen (and will still further see), bear out this assertion. Government was run and ruled at basis by the great thieves, as it is conspicuously to-day.

THE PASSING OF THE MIDDLE CLASS.

Yet let us not go so fast. It is necessary to remember that the last few decades have constituted a period of startling transitions.

The middle class, comprising the small business and factory men, stubbornly insisted on adhering to worn-out methods of doing business. Its only conception of industry was that of the methods of the year 1825. It refused to see that the centralization of industry was inevitable, and that it meant progress. It lamented the decay of its own power, and tried by every means at its command to thwart the purposes of the trusts. This middle class had bribed and cheated and had exploited the worker. For decades it had shaped public opinion to support the dictum that "competition was the life of trade." It had, by this shaping of opinion, enrolled on its side a large number of workers who saw only the temporary evils, and not the ultimate good, involved in the scientific organization and centralization of industry. The middle class put through anti-trust laws and other measure after measure aimed at the great combinations.

These great combinations had, therefore, a double fight on their hands. On the one hand they had to resist the trades unions, and on the other, the middle class. It was necessary to their interests that centralization of industry should continue. In fact, it was historically and economically necessary. Consequently they had to bend every effort to make nugatory any effort of Government, both National and State, to enforce the anti-trust laws. The thing had to be done no matter how. It was intolerable that industrial development could be stopped by a middle class which, for self-interest, would have kept matters at a standstill. Self-interest likewise demanded that the nascent combinations and trusts get and exercise governmental power by any means they could use. For a while triumphant in passing certain laws which, it was fatuously expected, would wipe the trusts out of existence, the middle class was hopelessly beaten and routed. By their far greater command of resources and money, the great magnates were able to frustrate the execution of those laws, and gradually to install themselves or their tools in practically supreme power. The middle class is now becoming a mere memory. Even the frantic efforts of President Roosevelt in its behalf were of absolutely no avail; the trusts are mightier than ever before, and hold a sway the disputing of which is ineffective.

THE TRUSTS AND THE UNEMPLOYED.

With this newer organization and centralization of industry the number of unemployed tremendously increased. In the panic of 1893 it reached about 3,000,000; in that of 1908 perhaps 6,000,000, certainly 5,000,000. To the appalling suffering on every hand the Government remained indifferent. The reasons were two-fold: Government was administered by the capitalist class whose interest it was not to allow any measure to be passed which might strengthen the workers, or decrease the volume of surplus labor; the second was that Government was basically the apotheosis of the current commercial idea that the claims of property were superior to those of human life.

It can be said without exaggeration that high functionary after high functionary in the legislative or executive branches of the Government, and magnate after magnate had committed not only one violation, but constant violations, of the criminal law. They were unmolested; having the power to prevent it they assuredly would not suffer themselves to undergo even the farce of prosecution. Such few prosecutions as were started with suspicious bluster by the Government against the Standard Oil Company, the Sugar Trust, the Tobacco Trust and other trusts proved to be absolutely harmless, and have had no result except to strengthen the position of the trusts. The great magnates reaped their wealth by an innumerable succession of frauds and thefts. But the moment that wealth or the basis of that wealth were threatened in the remotest by any law or movement, the whole body of Government, executive, legislative and judicial, promptly stepped in to protect it intact.

The workers, however, from whom the wealth was robbed, were regarded in law as criminals the moment they became impoverished. If homeless and without visible means of support, they were subject to arrest as vagabonds. Numbers of them were constantly sent to prison or, in some States, to the chain-gang. If they ventured to hold mass meetings to urge the Government to start a series of public works to relieve the unemployed, their meetings were broken up and the assembled brutally clubbed, as happened in Tompkins square in New York City in the panic of 1873, in Washington in 1892, and in Chicago and in Union square, New York City, in the panic of 1908. The newspapers represented these meetings as those of irresponsible agitators, inciting the "mob" to violence. The clubbing of the unemployed and the judicial murder of their spokesman, has long been a favorite repression method of the authorities. But as for allowing them freedom of speech, considering the grievances, putting forth every effort to relieve their condition,—these do not seem to have come within the scope of that Government whose every move has been one of intense hostility—now open, again covert—to the working class.

This running sketch, which is to be supplemented by the most specific details, gives a sufficient insight into the debasement and despoiling of the working class while the capitalists were using the Government as an expropriating machine. Meanwhile, how was the great farming class faring? What were the consequences to this large body of the seizure by a few of the greater part of the public domain?

THE STATE OF THE FARMING POPULATION.

The conditions of the farming population, along with that of the working class, steadily grew worse. In the hope of improving their condition large numbers migrated from the Eastern States, and a constant influx of agriculturists poured in from Europe.

A comparatively few of the whole were able to get land direct from the Government. Naturally the course of this extensive migration followed the path of transportation, that is to say, of the railroads. This was exactly what the railroad corporations had anticipated. As a rule the migrating farmers found the railroads or cattlemen already in possession of many of the best lands. To give a specific idea of how vast and widespread were the railroad holdings in the various States, this tabulation covering the years up to 1883 will suffice: In the States of Florida, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi about 9,000,000 acres in all; in Wisconsin, 3,553,865 acres; Missouri, 2,605,251 acres; Arkansas, 2,613,631 acres; Illinois, 2,595,053 acres; Iowa, 4,181,929 acres; Michigan, 3,355,943 acres; Minnesota, 9,830,450 acres; Nebraska, 6,409,376 acres; Colorado, 3,000,000 acres; the State of Washington, 11,700,000 acres; New Mexico, 11,500,000 acres; in the Dakotas, 8,000,000 acres; Oregon, 5,800,000 acres; Montana, 17,000,000 acres; California, 16,387,000; Idaho, 1,500,000, and Utah, 1,850,000. [Footnote: "The Public Domain," House Ex. Doc. No. 47, Third Session, Forty-sixth Congress: 273.]

Prospective farmers had to pay the railroads exorbitant prices for land. Very often they had not sufficient funds; a mortgage or two would be signed; and if the farmer had a bad season or two, and could no longer pay the interest, foreclosure would result. But whether crops were good or bad, the American farmer constantly had to compete in the grain markets of the world with the cheap labor of India and Russia. And inexorably, East or West, North or South, he was caught between a double fire.

On the one hand, in order to compete with the immense capitalist farms gradually developing, he had to give up primitive implements and buy the most improved agricultural machines. For these he was charged five and six times the sum it cost the manufacturers to make and market them. Usually if he could not pay for them outright, the manufacturers took out a mortgage on his farm. Large numbers of these mortgages were foreclosed.

In addition, the time had passed when the farmer made his own clothes and many other articles. For everything that he bought he had to pay excessive prices. He, even more than the industrial working classes, had to pay an enormous manufacturer's profit, and additionally the high freight railroad rate.

On the other hand, the great capitalist agencies directly dealing with the crops—the packing houses, the gambling cotton and produce exchanges—actually owned, by a series of manipulations, a large proportion of his crops before they were out of the ground. These crops were sold to the working class at exorbitant prices. The small farmer labored incessantly, only to find himself getting poorer. It served political purpose well to describe glowingly the farmer's prosperity; but the greater crops he raised, the greater the profit to the railroad companies and to various other divisions of the capitalist class. His was the labor and worry; they gathered in the financial harvest.

METHODS OF THE GREAT LANDOWNERS.

While thus the produce of the farmer's labor was virtually confiscated by the different capitalist combinations, the farmers of many States, particularly of the rich agricultural States of the West, were unable to stand up against the encroachments, power, and the fraudulent methods of the great capitalist landowners.

The land frauds in the State of California will serve as an example. Acting under the authority of various measures passed by Congress— measures which have been described—land grabbers succeeded in obtaining possession of an immense area in that State. Perjury, fraudulent surveys and entries, collusion with Government officials— these were a few of the many methods.

Jose Limantour, by an alleged grant from a Mexican Governor, and collusion with officials, almost succeeded in stealing more than half a million acres. Henry Miller, who came to the United States as an immigrant in 1850, is to-day owner of 14,539,000 acres of the richest land in California and Oregon. It embraces more than 22,500 square miles, a territory three times as large as New Jersey. The stupendous land frauds in all of the Western and Pacific States by which capitalists obtained "an empire of land, timber and mines" are amply described in numerous documents of the period. These land thieves, as was developed in official investigations, had their tools and associates in the Land Commissioner's office, in the Government executive departments, and in both houses of Congress. The land grabbers did their part in driving the small farmer from the soil. Bailey Millard, who extensively investigated the land frauds in California, after giving full details, says:

When you have learned these things it is not difficult to understand how one hundred men in the great Sacramento Valley have come to own over 17,000,000 acres, while in the San Joaquin Valley it is no uncommon thing for one man's name to stand for 100,000 acres. This grabbing of large tracts has discouraged immigration to California more than any other single factor. A family living on a small holding in a vast plain, with hardly a house in sight, will in time become a very lonely family indeed, and will in a few years be glad to sell out to the land king whose domain is adjacent. Thousands of small farms have in this way been acquired by the large holders at nominal prices. [Footnote: "The West Coast Land Grabbers." Everybody's Magazine, May, 1905.]

SEIZURE OF IMMENSE AREAS BY FRAUD.

Official reports of the period, contemporaneous with the original seizure of these immense tracts of land, give far more specific details of the methods by which that land was obtained. Of the numerous reports of committees of the California Legislature, we will here simply quote one—that of the Swamp Land Investigating Committee of the California Assembly of 1873. Dealing with the fraudulent methods by which huge areas of the finest lands in California were obtained for practically nothing as "swamp" land, this committee reported, citing from what it termed a "mighty mass of evidence," "That through the connivance of parties, surveyors were appointed who segregated lands as 'swamp,' which were not so in fact. The corruption existing in the land department of the General Government has aided this system of fraud."

Also, the committee commented with deep irony, "the loose laws of the State, governing all classes of State lands, has enabled wealthy parties to obtain much of it under circumstances which, in some countries, where laws are more rigid and terms less refined, would be termed fraudulent, but we can only designate it as keen foresight and wise (for the land grabbers) construction of loose, unwholesome laws." [Footnote: Report of the Swamp Land Investigating Committee, Appendix to California Journals of Senate and Assembly. Twentieth Session, 1874, Vol. iv, Doc. No. 5:3. ]

After recording its findings that it was satisfied from the evidence that "the grossest frauds have been committed in swamp matters in this State, "the committee went on:

Formerly it was the custom to permit filings upon real or alleged swamp lands, and to allow the applications to lie unacted upon for an indefinite number of years, at the option of the applicants. In these cases, parties on the "inside" of the Land Office "ring" had but to wait until some one should come along who wanted to take up these lands in good faith, and they would "sell out" to them their "rights" to land on which they had never paid a cent, nor intended to pay a cent.

Or, if the nature of the land was doubtful, they would postpone all investigation until the height of the floods during the rainy season, when surveyors, in interest with themselves, would be sent out to make favorable reports as to the "swampy" character of the land. In the mountain valleys and on the other side of the Sierras, the lands are overflowed from melting snow exactly when the water is most wanted; but the simple presence of the water is all that is necessary to show to the speculators that the land is "swamp," and it therefore presents an inviting opportunity for this grasping cupidity. [Footnote: Report of the Swamp Land Investigating Committee, etc., 5.]

In his exhaustive report for 1885, Commissioner Sparks, of the General Land Office, described at great length the vast frauds that had continuously been going on in the granting of alleged "swamp" lands, and in fraudulent surveys, in many States and Territories. [Footnote: House Documents, First Session, Forty-ninth Congress, 1885-86, Vol. ii.] "I thus found this office," he wrote, "a mere instrumentality in the hands of 'surveying rings.'" [Footnote: Ibid., 166] "Sixteen townships examined in Colorado in 1885 were found to have been surveyed on paper only, no actual surveying having been done. [Footnote: Ibid., 165 ] In twenty-two other townships examined in Colorado, purporting to have been surveyed under a "special- deposit" contract awarded in 1881, the surveys were found wholly fraudulent in seven, while the other fifteen were full of fraud." [Footnote: House Documents, etc., 1885-86, ii: 165]

These are a very few of the numerous instances cited by Commissioner Sparks. Although the law restricted surveys to agricultural lands and for homestead entries, yet the Land Office had long corruptly allowed what it was pleased to term certain "liberal regulations." Surveys were so construed as to include any portion of townships the "larger portion" of which was not "known" to be of a mineral character. These "regulations," which were nothing more or less than an extra-legal license to land-grabbers, also granted surveys for desert lands and timber lands under the timber-land act. By the terms of this act, it will be recalled, those who entered and took title to desert and timber lands were not required to be actual settlers. Thus, it was only necessary for the surveyors in the hire of the great land grabbers to report fine grazing, agricultural, timber or mineral land as "desert land," and vast areas could be seized by single individuals or corporations with facility.

Two specific laws directly contributed to the effectiveness of this spoliation. One act, passed by Congress on May 30, 1862, authorized surveys to be made at the expense of settlers in the townships that those settlers desired surveyed. Another act, called the Deposit Act, passed in 1871, provided that the amounts deposited by settlers should be partly applied in payment for the lands thus surveyed. Together, these two laws made the grasping of land on an extensive scale a simple process. The "settler" (which so often meant, in reality, the capitalist) could secure the collusion of the Land Office, and have fraudulent surveys made. Under these surveys he could lay claim to immense tracts of the most valuable land and have them reported as "swamp" or "desert" lands; he could have the boundaries of original claims vastly enlarged; and the fact that part of his disbursements for surveying was considered as a payment for those lands, stood in law as virtually a confirmation of his claim.

ACTUAL SETTLERS EXCLUDED FROM PUBLIC DOMAIN.

"Wealthy speculators and powerful syndicates," reported Commissioner Sparks,

covet the public domain, and a survey is the first step in the accomplishment of this desire. The bulk of deposit surveys have been made in timber districts and grazing regions, and the surveyed lands have immediately been entered under the timber land, premption, commuted homestead, timber-culture and desert-land acts. So thoroughly organized has been the entire system of procuring the survey and making illegal entry of lands, that agents and attorneys engaged in this business have been advised of every official proceeding, and enabled to present entry applications for the lands at the very moment of the filing of the plots of survey in the local land offices.

Prospectors employed by lumber firms and corporations seek out and report the most valuable timber tracts in California, Oregon, Washington Territory or elsewhere; settler's applications are manufactured as a basis for survey; contracts are entered into and pushed through the General Land Office in hot haste; a skeleton survey is made... entry papers, made perfect in form by competent attorneys, are filed in bulk, and the manipulators enter into possession of the land. . . . This has been the course of proceeding heretofore. [Footnote: House Documents, etc., 1885-86, ii: 167.]

Commissioner Sparks described a case where it was discovered by his special agents in California that an English firm had obtained 100,000 acres of the choicest red-wood lands in that State. These lands were then estimated to be worth $100 an acre. The cost of procuring surveys and fraudulent entries did not probably exceed $3 an acre. [Footnote: House Ex. Docs., etc., 1885-86, ii: 167.]

"In the same manner," Commissioner Sparks continued, "extensive coal deposits in our Western territory are acquired in mass through expedited surveys, followed by fraudulent pre-emption and commuted homestead entries." [Footnote: Ibid.] He went on to tell that nearly the whole of the Territory (now State) of Wyoming, and large portions of Montana, had been surveyed under the deposit system, and the lands on the streams fraudulently taken up under the desert land act, to the exclusion of actual settlers. Nearly all of Colorado, the very best cattle-raising portions of New Mexico, the rich timber lands of California, the splendid forest lands of Washington Territory and the principal part of the extensive pine lands of Minnesota had been fraudulently seized in the same way. [Footnote: Ibid., 168.] In all of the Western States and Territories these fraudulent surveys had accomplished the seizure of the best and most valuable lands. "To enable the pressing tide of Western immigration to secure homes upon the public domain," Commissioner Sparks urged, "it is necessary... that hundreds of millions of acres of public lands now appropriated should be wrested from illegal control." [Footnote: Ibid.] But nothing was done to recover these stolen lands. At the very time Commissioner Sparks—one of the very few incorruptible Commissioners of Public Lands,—was writing this, the land-grabbing interests were making the greatest exertions to get him removed. During his tenure of office they caused him to be malevolently harassed and assailed. After he left office they resumed complete domination of the Land Commissioner's Bureau. [Footnote: The methods of capitalists in causing the removal of officials who obstructed or exposed their crimes and violent seizure of property were continuous and long enduring. It was a very old practice. When Astor was debauching and swindling Indian tribes, he succeeded, it seems, by exerting his power at Washington, in causing Government agents standing in his way to be dismissed from office. The following is an extract from a communication, in 1821, of the U. S. Indian agent at Green Bay, Wisconsin, to the U. S. Superintendent of Indian Trade:

"The Indians are frequently kept in a state of intoxication, giving their furs, etc., at a great sacrifice for whiskey.... The agents of Mr. Astor hold out the idea that they will, ere long be able to break down the factories [Government agencies]; and they menace the Indian agents and others who may interfere with them, with dismission from office through Mr. Astor. They say that a representation from Messrs. Crooks and Stewart (Mr. Astor's agents) led to the dismission of the Indian agent at Mackinac, and they also say that the Indian agent here is to be dismissed...."—U.S. Senate Documents, First Session, Seventeenth Congress, 1821-22, Vol. i, Doc. No. 60:52-53.]

THE GIGANTIC PRIVATE LAND CLAIM FRAUDS.

The frauds in the settlement of private land claims on alleged grants by Spain and Mexico were colossal. Vast estates in California, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and other States were obtained by collusion with the Government administrative officials and Congress. These were secured upon the strength of either forged documents purporting to be grants from the Spanish or Mexican authorities, or by means of fraudulent surveys.

One of the most notorious of these was the Beaubin and Miranda grant, otherwise famous thirty years ago as the Maxwell land grant. A reference to it here is indispensable. It was by reason of this transaction, as well as by other similar transactions, that one of the American multimillionaires obtained his original millions. This individual was Stephen B. Elkins, at present a powerful member of the United States Senate, and one of the ruling oligarchy of wealth. He is said to possess a fortune of at least $50,000,000, and his daughter, it is reported, is to marry the Duke of the Abruzzi, a scion of the royal family of Italy.

The New Mexico claim of Beaubin and Miranda transferred to L. B. Maxwell, was allowed by the Government in 1869, but for ninety-six thousand acres only. The owner refused to comply with the law, and in 1874 the Department of the Interior ordered the grant to be treated as public lands and thrown open to settlement. Despite this order, the Government officials in New Mexico, acting in collusion with other interested parties, illegally continued to assess it as private property. In 1877 a fraudulent tax sale was held, and the grant, fraudulently enlarged to 1,714,764.94 acres, was purchased by M. M. Mills, a member of the New Mexico Legislature. He transferred the title to T. B. Catron, the United States Attorney for New Mexico. Presently Elkins turned up as the principal owner. The details of how this claim was repeatedly shown up to be fraudulent by Land Commissioners and Congressional Committees; how the settlers in New Mexico fought it and sought to have it declared void, and the law enforced; [Footnote: "Land Titles in New Mexico and Colorado," House Reports First Session, Fifty-second Congress, 1891-92, Vol. iv, Report No. 1253. Also, House Reports, First Session, Fifty-second Congress, 1891-92, Vol. vii, Report No. 1824. Also, House Reports, First Session, Forty-ninth Congress, 1885-86, ii: 170.] and how Elkins, for some years himself a Delegate in Congress from New Mexico, succeeded in having the grant finally validated on technical grounds, and "judicially cleared" of all taint of fraud, by an astounding decision of the Supreme Court of the United States—a decision contrary to the facts as specifically shown by successive Government officials—all of these details are set forth fully in another part of this work. [Footnote: See "The Elkins Fortune," in Vol. iii.]

The forgeries and fraudulent surveys by which these huge estates were secured were astoundingly bold and frequent. Large numbers of private land claims, rejected by various Land Commissioners as fraudulent, were corruptly confirmed by Congress. In 1870, the heirs of one Gervacio Nolan applied for confirmation of two grants alleged to have been made to an ancestor under the colonization laws of New Mexico. They claimed more than 1,500,000 acres, but Congress conditionally confirmed their claim to the extent of forty-eight thousand acres only, asserting that the Mexican laws had limited to this area the area of public lands that could be granted to one individual. In 1880 the Land Office re-opened the claim, and a new survey was made by surveyors in collusion with the claimants, and hired by them. When the report of this survey reached Washington, the Land Office officials were interested to note that the estate had grown from forty-eight thousand acres to five hundred and seventy-five thousand acres, or twelve times the legal quantity. [Footnote: House Reports, First Session, Forty-ninth Congress, 1885-86, ii: 171.] The actual settlers were then evicted. The romancer might say that the officials were amazed; they were not; such fraudulent enlargements were common.

The New Mexico estate of Francis Martinez, granted under the Mexican laws restricting a single grant to forty-eight thousand acres, was by a fraudulent survey, extended to 594,515.55 acres, and patented in 1881. [Footnote: Ibid., 172.] A New Mexico grant said to have been made to Salvador Gonzales, in 1742, comprising "a spot of land to enable him to plant a cornfield for the support of his family." was fraudulently surveyed and enlarged to 103,959.31 acres—a survey amended later by reducing the area to 23,661 acres. [Footnote: House Reports, etc, 1885-86, ii: 172.] The B. M. Montaya grant in New Mexico, limited to forty-eight thousand acres, under the Mexican colonization laws, was fraudulently surveyed for 151,056.97 acres. The Estancia grant in New Mexico also restricted under the colonization act to forty-eight thousand acres, was enlarged by a fraudulent survey to 415,036.56 acres. [Footnote: Ibid., 173.] In 1768, Ignacio Chaves and others in New Mexico petitioned for a tract of about two and one-fourth superficial leagues, or approximately a little less than ten thousand acres. A fraudulent survey magnified this claim to 243,036.43 acres. [Footnote: Ibid.]

These are a very few of the large number of forged or otherwise fraudulent claims.

Some were rejected by Congress; many, despite Land Office protests, were confirmed. By these fraudulent and corrupt operations, enormous estates were obtained in New Mexico, Colorado and in other sections. The Pablo Montaya grant comprised in all, 655,468.07 acres; the Mora grant 827,621.01 acres; the Tierra Amarilla grant 594,515 acres, and the Sangre de Cristo grant 998,780.46 acres. All of these were corruptly obtained. [Footnote: See Resolution of House Committee on Private Land Claims, June, 1892, demanding a thorough investigation. The House took no action.—Report No. 1824, 1892.] Scores of other claims were confirmed for lesser areas. During Commissioner Sparks' tenure of office, claims to 8,500,000 acres in New Mexico alone were pending before Congress. A comprehensive account of the operations of the land-grabbers, giving the explicit facts, as told in Government and court records, of their system of fraud, is presented in the chapter on the Elkins fortune.

FORGERY, PERJURY AND FRAUDULENT SURVEY.

Reporting, in 1881, to the Commissioner of the General Land Office, Henry M. Atkinson, U. S. Surveyor-General of New Mexico, wrote that "the investigation of this office for the past five years has demonstrated that some of the alleged grants are forgeries." He set forth that unless the court before which these claims were adjudicated could have full access to the archives, "it is much more liable to be imposed upon by fraudulent title papers." [Footnote: "The Public Domain," etc. 1124. Also see next Footnote.] In fact, the many official reports describe with what cleverness the claimants to these great areas forged their papers, and the facility with which they bought up witnesses to perjure for them. Finding it impossible to go back of the aggregate and corroborative "evidence" thus offered, the courts were frequently forced to decide in favor of the claimants. To use a modern colloquial phrase, the cases were "framed up." In the case of Luis Jamarillo's claim to eighteen thousand acres in New Mexico, U. S. Surveyor-General Julian of New Mexico, in recommending the rejection of the claim and calling attention to the perjury committed, said:

When these facts are considered, in connection with the further and well-known fact that such witnesses can readily be found by grant claimants, and that in this way the most monstrous frauds have been practiced in extending the lines of such grants in New Mexico, it is not possible to accept the statement of this witness as to the west boundary of this grant, which he locates at such a distance from the east line as to include more than four times the amount of land actually granted. [Footnote: Senate Executive Documents, First Session, Fiftieth Congress, 1887-88, Vol. i, Private Land Claim No. 103, Ex. Doc. No. 20:3. Documents Nos. 3 to 11, 13 to 23, 25 to 29 and 38 in the same volume deal with similar claims.]

"The widespread belief of the people of this country," wrote Commissioner Sparks in 1885, "that the land department has been largely conducted to the advantage of speculation and monopoly, private and corporate, rather than in the public interest, I have found supported by developments in every branch of the service.... I am satisfied that thousands of claims without foundation in law or equity, involving millions of acres of public land, have been annually passed to patent upon the single proposition that nobody but the Government had any adverse interest. The vast machinery of the land department has been devoted to the chief result of conveying the title of the United States to public lands upon fraudulent entries under loose construction of law." [Footnote: House Ex. Docs., 1885-86, ii: 156.] Whenever a capitalist's interest was involved, the law was always "loosely construed," but the strictest interpretation was invariably given to laws passed against the working population.

It was estimated, in 1892, that 57,000,000 acres of land in New Mexico and Colorado had, for more than thirty years, been unlawfully treated by public officers as having been ceded to the United States by Mexico. The Maxwell, Sangre de Cristo, Nolan and other grants were within this area. The House Committee on Private Land Claims reported on April 29, 1892: "A long list of alleged Mexican and Spanish grants within the limits of the Texas cession have been confirmed, or quit claimed by Congress, under the false representation that said alleged grants were located in the territory of New Mexico ceded by the treaty; an enormous area of land has long been and is now held as confirmed Mexican and Spanish grants, located in the territory of Mexico ceded by the treaty when such is not the fact." [Footnote: House Report, 1892, No. 1253:8.]

In Texas the fraudulent, and often, violent methods of the seizure of land by the capitalists were fully as marked as those used elsewhere.

Upon its admittance to the Union, Texas retained the disposition of its public lands. Up to about the year 1864, almost the entire area of Texas, comprising 274,356 square miles, or 175,587,840 acres, was one vast unfenced feeding ground for cattle, horses and sheep. In about the year 1874, the agricultural movement began; large numbers of intending farmers migrated to Texas, particularly with the expectation of raising cattle, then a highly profitable business. They found huge stretches of the land already preempted by individual capitalists or corporations. In a number of instances, some of these individuals, according to the report of a Congressional Committee, in 1884, dealing with Texas lands, had each acquired the ownership of more than two hundred and fifty thousand acres.

"It is a notorious fact," this committee reported, "that the public land laws, although framed with the special object of encouraging the public domain, of developing its resources and protecting actual settlers, have been extensively evaded and violated. Individuals and corporations have, by purchasing the proved-up claims, or purchases of ostensible settlers, employed by them to make entry, extensively secured the ownership of large bodies of land." [Footnote: House Reports, Second Session, Forty-eighth Congress, 1884-85, Vol. xxix, Ex. Doc. No. 267:43.] The committee went on to describe how, to a very considerable extent, "foreigners of large means" had obtained these great areas, and had gone into the cattle business, and how the titles to these lands were se-cured not only by individuals but by foreign corporations. "Certain of these foreigners are titled noblemen. Some of them have brought over from Europe, in considerable numbers, herdsmen and other employees who sustain to them a dependent relationship characteristic of the peasantry on the large landed estates of Europe." Two British syndicates, for instance, held 7,500,000 acres in Texas. [Footnote: House Reports, etc., 1884-85, Doc. No. 267:46.]

This spoliation of the public domain was one of the chief grievances of the National Greenback-Labor party in 1880. This party, to a great extent, was composed of the Western farming element. In his letter accepting the nomination of that party for President of the United States, Gen. Weaver, himself a member of long standing in Congress from Iowa, wrote:

An area of our public domain larger than the territory occupied by the great German Empire has been wantonly donated to wealthy corporations; while a bill introduced by Hon. Hendrick B. Wright, of Pennsylvania, to enable our poor people to reach and occupy the few acres remaining, has been scouted, ridiculed, and defeated in Congress. In consequence of this stupendous system of land-grabbing, millions of the young men of America, and millions more of industrious people from abroad, seeking homes in the New World, are left homeless and destitute. The public domain must be sacredly reserved to actual settlers, and where corporations have not complied strictly with the terms of their grants, the lands should be at once reclaimed.

INCREASE OF FARM TENANTRY.

Without dwelling upon all the causative factors—involving an extended work in themselves—some significant general results will be pointed out.

The original area of public domain amounted to 1,815,504,147 acres, of which considerably more than half, embracing some of the very best agricultural, grazing, mineral and timber lands, was already alienated by the year 1880. By 1896 the alienation reached 806,532,362 acres. Of the original area, about 50,000,000 acres of forests have been withdrawn from the public domain by the Government, and converted into forest reservations. Large portions of such of the agricultural, grazing, mineral and timber lands as were not seized by various corporations and favored individuals before 1880, have been expropriated west of the Mississippi since then, and the process is still going, notably in Alaska. The nominal records of the General Land Office as to the number of homesteaders are of little value and are very misleading. Immense numbers of alleged homesteaders were, as we have copiously seen, nothing but paid dummies by whose entries vast tracts of land were seized under color of law. It is indisputably clear that hundreds of millions of acres of the public domain have been obtained by outright fraud.

Notwithstanding the fact that only a few years before, the Government had held far more than enough land to have provided every agriculturist with a farm, yet by 1880, a large farm tenant class had already developed. Not less than 1,024,061 of the 4,008,907 farms in the United States were held by renters. One-fourth of all the farms in the United States were cultivated by men who did not own them. Furthermore, and even more impressive, there were 3,323,876 farm laborers composed of men who did not even rent land. Equally significant was the increasing tendency to the operating of large farms by capitalists with the hired labor. Of farms under cultivation, extending from one hundred to five hundred acres, there were nearly a million and a half—1,416,618, to give the exact number—owned largely by capitalists and cultivated by laborers. [Footnote: Tenth Census, Statistics of Agriculture: 28.]

Phillips, who had superior opportunities for getting at the real facts, and whose volume upon the subject issued at the time is well worthy of consideration, thus commented upon the census returns:

It will thus be seen that of the 7,670,493 persons in our country engaged in agriculture, there are 1,024,601 who pay rent to persons not cultivating the soil; 1,508,828 capitalist or speculating owners, who own the soil and employ laborers; 804,522 of well-to-do farmers who hire part of their work or employ laborers, and 670,944 who may be said to actually cultivate the soil they own: the rest are hired workers.

Phillips goes on to remark:

Another fact must be borne in mind, that a large number of the 2,984,306 farmers who own land are in debt for it to the money lenders. From the writer's observation it is probable that forty per cent, of them are so deeply in debt as to pay a rent in interest. This squeezing process is going on at the rate of eight and ten per cent., and in most cases can terminate in but one way. [Footnote: "Labor, Land and Law": 353. It is difficult to get reliable statistics on the number of mortgages on farms, and on the number of farm tenants. The U.S. Industrial Commission estimated, in 1902, that fifty per cent, of the homesteads in Eastern Minnesota were mortgaged. Although admitting that such a condition had been general, it represented in its Final Report that a large number of mortgages in certain States had been paid off. According to the "Political Science Quarterly" (Vol. xi, No. 4, 1896) the United States Census of 1890 showed a marked increase, not only absolutely, but relatively in the number of farm tenants. It can hardly be doubted that farm tenantry is rapidly increasing and will under the influence of various causes increase still more.]

A LARGELY DISPOSSESSED NATION.

These are the statistics of a Government which, it is known, seeks to make its showing as favorable as possible to the existing regime. They make it clear that a rapid process of the dispossession of the industrial working, the middle and the small farming classes has been going on unceasingly. If the process was so marked in 1900 what must it be now? All of the factors operating to impoverish the farming population of the United States and turn them into homeless tenants have been a thousandfold intensified and augmented in the last ten years, beginning with the remarkable formation of hundreds of trusts in 1898. Even though the farmer may get higher prices for his products, as he did in 1908 and 1909, the benefits are deceptively transient, while the expropriating process is persistent.

There was a time when farm land in Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, Indiana, Wisconsin, and many other States was considered of high value. But in the last few years an extraordinary sight has been witnessed. Hundreds of thousands of American farmers migrated to the virgin fields of Northwest Canada and settled there—a portentous movement significant of the straits to which the American farmer has been driven.

Abandoned farms in the East are numerous; in New York State alone 22,000 are registered. Hitherto the farmer has considered himself a sort of capitalist: if not hostile to the industrial working classes, he has been generally apathetic. But now he is being forced to the point of being an absolute dependant himself, and will inevitably align his interests with those of his brothers in the factories and in the shops.

With this contrast of the forces at work which gave empires of public domain to the few, while dispossessing the tens of millions, we will now proceed to a consideration of some of the fortunes based upon railroads.



CHAPTER III

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE VANDERBILT FORTUNE

The first of the overshadowing fortunes to develop from the ownership and manipulation of railroads was that of Cornelius Vanderbilt. The Havemeyers and other factory owners, whose descendants are now enrolled among the conspicuous multimillionaires, were still in the embryonic stages when Vanderbilt towered aloft in a class by himself with a fortune of $105,000,000. In these times of enormous individual accumulations and centralization of wealth, the personal possession of $105,000,000 does not excite a fraction of the astonished comment that it did at Cornelius Vanderbilt's death in 1877. Accustomed as the present generation is to the sight of billionaires or semi- billionaires, it cannot be expected to show any wonderment at fortunes of lesser proportions.

NINETY MILLIONS IN FIFTEEN YEARS.

Yet to the people of thirty years ago, a round hundred million was something vast and unprecedented. In 1847 millionaires were so infrequent that the very word, as we have seen, was significantly italicised. But here was a man who, figuratively speaking, was a hundred millionaires rolled in one. Compared with his wealth the great fortunes of ten or fifteen years before dwindled into bagatelles. During the Civil War a fortune of $15,000,000 had been looked upon as monumental. Even the huge Astor fortune, so long far outranking all competitors, lost its exceptional distinction and ceased being the sole, unrivalled standard of immense wealth. Nearly a century of fraud was behind the Astor fortune. The greater part of Cornelius Vanderbilt's wealth was massed together in his last fifteen years.

This was the amazing, unparalleled feature to his generation. Within fifteen brief years he had possessed himself of more than $90,000,000. His wealth came rushing in at the rate of $6,000,000 a year. Such an accomplishment may not impress the people of these years, familiar as they are with the ease with which John D. Rockefeller and other multimillionaires have long swept in almost fabulous annual revenues. With his yearly income of fully $80,000,000 or $85,000,000 [Footnote: The "New York Commercial," an ultra- conservative financial and commercial publication, estimated in January, 1905, his annual income to be $72,000,000. Obviously it has greatly increased every year.] Rockefeller can look back and smile with superior disdain at the commotion raised by the contemplation of Cornelius Vanderbilt's $6,000,000.

Each period to itself, however. Cornelius Vanderbilt was the golden luminary of his time, a magnate of such combined, far-reaching wealth and power as the United States had never known. Indeed, one overruns the line of tautology in distinguishing between wealth and power. The two were then identical not less than now. Wealth was the real power. None knew or boasted of this more than old Vanderbilt when, with advancing age, he became more arrogant and choleric and less and less inclined to smooth down the storms he provoked by his contemptuous flings at the great pliable public. When threatened by competitors, or occasionally by public officials, with the invocation of the law, he habitually sneered at them and vaunted his defiance. In terse sentences, interspersed with profanity, he proclaimed the fact that money was law; that it could buy either laws or immunity from the law.

* * * * * * *

Since wealth meant power, both economic and political, it is not difficult to estimate Vanderbilt's supreme place in his day.

Far below him, in point of possessions, stretched the 50,000,000 individuals who made up the nation's population. Nearly 10,000,000 were wage laborers, and of the 10,000,000 fully 500,000 were child laborers. The very best paid of skilled workers received in the highest market not more than $1,040 a year. The usual weekly pay ran from $12 to $20 a week; the average pay of unskilled laborers was $350 a year. More than 7,500,000 persons ploughed and hoed and harvested the farms of the country; comparatively few of them could claim a decent living, and a large proportion were in debt. The incomes of the middle class, including individual employers, business and professional men, tradesmen and small middlemen, ranged from $1,000 to $10,000 a year.

How immeasurably puny they all seemed beside Vanderbilt! He beheld a multitude of many millions struggling fiercely for the dollar that meant livelihood or fortune; those bits of metal or paper which commanded the necessities, comforts and luxuries of life; the antidote of grim poverty and the guarantees of good living; which dictated the services, honorable or often dishonorable, of men, women and children; which bought brains not less than souls, and which put their sordid seal on even the most sacred qualities. Now by these tokens, he had securely 105,000,000 of these bits of metal or wealth in some form equivalent to them. Millions of people had none of these dollars; the hundreds of thousands had a few; the thousands had hundreds of thousands; the few had millions. He had more than any.

Even with all his wealth, great as it was in his day, he would scarcely be worth remembrance were it not that he was the founder of a dynasty of wealth. Therein lies the present importance of his career.

A FORTUNE OF $700,000,000

From $105,000,000 bequeathed at his death, the Vanderbilt fortune has grown until it now reaches fully $700,000,000. This is an approximate estimate; the actual amount may be more or less. In 1889 Shearman placed the wealth of Cornelius and William K. Vanderbilt, grandsons of the first Cornelius, at $100,000,000 each, and that of Frederick W. Vanderbilt, a brother of those two men, at $20,000,000. [Footnote: "Who Owns the United States?"—The Forum Magazine, November, 1889.] Adding the fortunes of the various other members of the Vanderbilt family, the Vanderbilts then possessed about $300,000,000. Since that time the population and resources of the United States have vastly increased; wealth in the hold of a few has become more intensely centralized; great fortunes have gone far beyond their already extraordinary boundaries of twenty years ago; the possessions of the Vanderbilts have expanded and swollen in value everywhere, although recently the Standard Oil oligarchy has been encroaching upon their possessions. Very probable it is that the combined Vanderbilt fortune reaches fully $700,000,000, actually and potentially.

But the incidental mention of such a mass of money conveys no adequate conception of the power of this family. Nominally it is composed of private citizens with theoretically the same rights and limitations of citizenship held by any other citizen and no more. But this is a fanciful picture. In reality, the Vanderbilt family is one of the dynasties of inordinately rich families ruling the United States industrially and politically. Singly it has mastery over many of the railroad and public utility systems and industrial corporations of the United States. In combination with other powerful men or families of wealth, it shares the dictatorship of many more corporations. Under the Vanderbilts' direct domination are 21,000 miles of railroad lines, the ownership of which is embodied in $600,000,000 in stocks and $700,000,000 in bonds. One member alone, William K. Vanderbilt, is a director of seventy-three transportation and industrial combinations or corporations.

BONDS THAT HOLD PRESENT AND POSTERITY.

Behold, in imagination at least, this mass of stocks and bonds. Heaps of paper they seem; dead, inorganic things. A second's blaze will consume any one of them, a few strokes of the fingers tear it into shapeless ribbons Yet under the institution of law, as it exists, these pieces of paper are endowed with a terrible power of life and death that even enthroned kings do not possess. Those dainty prints with their scrolls and numerals and inscriptions are binding titles to the absolute ownership of a large part of the resources created by the labors of entire peoples.

Kingly power at best is shadowy, indefinite, depending mostly upon traditional custom and audacious assumption backed by armed force. If it fall back upon a certain alleged divine right it cannot produce documents to prove its authority. The industrial monarchs of the United States are fortified with both power and proofs of possession. Those bonds and stocks are the tangible titles to tangible property; whoso holds them is vested with the ownership of the necessities of tens of millions of subjected people. Great stretches of railroad traverse the country; here are coal mines to whose products some ninety million people look for warmth; yonder are factories; there in the cities are street car lines and electric light and power supply and gas plants; on every hand are lands and forests and waterways— all owned, you find, by this or that dominant man or family.

The mind wanders back in amazement to the times when, if a king conquered territory, he had to erect a fortress or castle and station a garrison to hold it. They that then disputed the king's title could challenge, if they chose, at peril of death, the provisions of that title, which same provisions were swords and spears, arrows and muskets.

But nowhere throughout the large extent of the Vanderbilt's possessions or those of other ruling families are found warlike garrisons as evidence of ownership. Those uncouth barbarian methods are grossly antiquated; the part once played by armed battalions is now performed by bits of paper. A wondrously convenient change has it been; the owners of the resources of nations can disport themselves thousands of miles away from the scene of their ownership; they need never bestir themselves to provide measures for the retention of their property. Government, with its array of officials, prisons, armies and navies, undertakes all of this protection for them. So long as they hold these bits of paper in their name, Government recognizes them as the incontestable owners and safeguards their property accordingly. The very Government established on the taxation of the workers is used to enforce the means by which the workers are held in subjection.

THEY DECREE TAXES AT WILL.

These batches of stocks and bonds betoken as much more again. A pretty fiction subsists that Government, the creator of the modern private corporation, is necessarily more powerful than its creature. This theoretical doctrine, so widely taught by university professors and at the same time so greatly at variance with the palpable facts, will survive to bring dismay in the near future to the very classes who would have the people believe it so. Instead of now being the superior of the corporation the Government has long since definitely surrendered to private corporations a tremendous taxing power amounting virtually to a decree authorizing enslavement. Upon every form of private corporation—railroad, industrial, mining, public utility—is conferred a peculiarly sweeping and insidious power of taxation the indirectness of which often obscures its frightful nature and effects.

Where, however, the industrial corporation has but one form of taxation the railroad has many forms. The trust in oil or any other commodity can tax the whole nation at its pleasure, but inherently only on the one product it controls. That single taxation is of itself confiscatory enough, as is seen in the $912,000,000 of profits gathered in by the Standard Oil Company since its inception. The trust tax is in the form of its selling price to the public. But the railroad puts its tax upon every product transported or every person who travels. Not a useful plant grows or an article is made but that, if shipped, a heavy tax must be paid on it. This tax comes in the guise of freight or passenger rates.

The labor of hundreds of millions of people contributes incessantly to the colossal revenues enriching the railroad owners. For their producing capacity the workers are paid the meagerest wages, and the products which they make they are compelled to buy back at exorbitant prices after they pass through the hands of the various great capitalist middlemen, such as the trusts and the railroads. How enormous the revenues of the railroads are may be seen in the fact that in the ten years from 1898 to 1908 the dividends declared by thirty-five of the leading railroads in the United States reached the sum of about $1,800,000,000. This railroad taxation is a grinding, oppressive one, from which there is no appeal. If the Government taxes too heavily the people nominally can have a say; but the people have absolutely no voice in altering the taxation of corporations. Pseudo attempts have been made to regulate railroad charges, but their futility was soon evident, for the reason that owning the instruments of business the railroads and the allied trusts are in actual possession of the governmental power viewing it as a working whole.

AND EXERCISE UNRESTRAINED POWER.

Visualizing this power one begins to get a vivid perception of the comprehensive sway of the Vanderbilts and of other railroad magnates. They levy tribute without restraint—a tribute so vast that the exactions of classic conquerors become dwarfed beside it. If this levying entailed only the seizing of money, that cold, unbreathing, lifeless substance, then human emotion might not start in horror at the consequences. But beneath it all are the tugging and tearing of human muscles and minds, the toil and sweat of an unnumbered multitude, the rending of homes, the infliction of sorrow, suffering and death.

The magnates, as we have said, hold the power of decreeing life and death; and time never was since the railroads were first built when this power was not arbitrarily exercised.

Millions have gone hungry or lived on an attenuated diet while elsewhere harvests rotted in the ground; between their needs and nature's fertility lay the railroads. Organized and maintained for profit and for profit alone, the railroads carry produce and products at their fixed rates and not a whit less; if these rates are not paid the transportation is refused. And as in these times transportation is necessary in the world's intercourse, the men who control it have the power to stand as an inflexible barrier between individuals, groups of individuals, nations and international peoples. The very agencies which should under a rational form of civilization be devoted to promoting the interests of mankind, are used as their capricious self-interest incline them by the few who have been allowed to obtain control of them. What if helpless people are swept off by starvation or by diseases superinduced by lack of proper food? What if in the great cities an increasing sacrifice of innocents goes on because their parents cannot afford the price of good milk—a price determined to a large extent by railroad tariff? All of this slaughter and more makes no impress upon the unimpressionable surfaces of these stocks and bonds, and leaves no record save in the hospitals and graveyards.

The railroad magnates have other powers. Government itself has no power to blot a town out of existence. It cannot strew desolation at will. But the railroad owners can do it and do not hesitate if sufficient profits be involved. One man sitting in a palace in New York can give an order declaring a secret discriminative tariff against the products of a place, whereupon its industries no longer able to compete with formidable competitors enjoying better rates, close down and the life of the place flickers and sometimes goes out.

These are but a very few of the immensity of extravagant powers conferred by the ownership of these railroad bonds and stocks. Bonds they assuredly are, incomparably more so than the clumsy yokes of olden days. Society has improved its outwards forms in these passing centuries. Clanking chains are no longer necessary to keep slaves in subjection. Far more effective than chains and balls and iron collars are the ownership of the means whereby men must live. Whoever controls them in large degree, is a potentate by whatever name he be called, and those who depend upon the owner of them for their sustenance are slaves by whatever flattering name they choose to go.

HIGH AND MIGHTY POTENTATES.

The Vanderbilts are potentates. Their power is bounded by no law; they are among the handful of fellow potentates who say what law shall be and how it shall be enforced. No stern, masterful men and women are they as some future moonstruck novelist or historian bent upon creating legendary lore may portray them. Voluptuaries are most of them, sunk in a surfeit of gorgeous living and riotous pleasure. Weak, without distinction of mind or heart, they have the money to hire brains to plan, plot, scheme, advocate, supervise and work for them. Suddenly deprived of their stocks and bonds they would find themselves adrift in the sheerest helplessness. With these stocks and bonds they are the direct absolute masters of an army of employees. On the New York Central Railroad alone the Vanderbilt payroll embraces fifty thousand workers. This is but one of their railroad systems. As many more, or nearly as many, men work directly for them on their other railroad lines.

One hundred thousand men signify, let us say, as many families. Accepting the average of five to a family, here are five hundred thousand souls whose livelihood is dependent upon largely the will of the Vanderbilt family. To that will there is no check. To-day it may be expansively benevolent; to-morrow, after a fit of indigestion or a night of demoralizing revelry, it may flit to an extreme of parsimonious retaliation. As the will fluctuates, so must be the fate of the hundred thousand workers. If the will decides that the pay of the men must go down, curtailed it is, irrespective of their protests that the lopping off of their already slender wages means still keener hardship. Apparently free and independent citizens, this army of workers belong for all essential purposes to the Vanderbilt family. Their jobs are the hostages held by the Vanderbilts. The interests and decisions of one family are supreme.

The germination and establishment of this immense power began with the activities of the first Cornelius Vanderbilt, the founder of this pile of wealth. He was born in 1794. His parents lived on Staten Island; his father conveyed passengers in a boat to and from New York—an industrious, dull man who did his plodding part and allowed his wife to manage household expenses. Regularly and obediently he turned his earnings over to her. She carefully hoarded every available cent, using an old clock as a depository.

THE FOUNDER'S START.

Vanderbilt was a rugged, headstrong, untamable, illiterate youth. At twelve years of age he could scarcely write his own name. But he knew the ways of the water; when still a youth he commenced ferrying passengers and freight between Staten Island and New York City. For books he cared nothing; the refinements of life he scorned. His one passion was money. He was grasping and enterprising, coarse and domineering. Of the real details of his early life little is known except what has been written by laudatory writers. We are informed that as he gradually made and saved money he built his own schooners, and went in for the coasting trade. The invention and success of the steamboat, it is further related, convinced him that the day of the sailing vessel would soon be over. He, therefore, sold his interest in his schooners, and was engaged as captain of a steamboat plying between New York and points on the New Jersey coast. His wife at the same time enlarged the family revenues by running a wayside tavern at New Brunswick, N. J., whither Vanderbilt had moved.

In 1829, when his resources reached $30,000, he quit as an employee and began building his own steamboats. Little by little he drove many of his competitors out of business. This he was able to do by his harsh, unscrupulous and strategic measures. [Footnote: Some glimpses of Vanderbilt's activities and methods in his early career are obtainable from the court records. In 1827 he was fined two penalties of $50 for refusing to move a steamboat called "The Thistle," commanded by him, from a wharf on the North River in order to give berth to "The Legislature," a competing steamboat. His defence was that Adams, the harbor master, had no authority to compel him to move. The lower courts decided against him, and the Supreme Court, on appeal, affirmed their judgment. (Adams vs. Vanderbilt. Cowen's Reports. Cases in Supreme Court of the State of New York, vii: 349- 353.)

In 1841 the Eagle Iron Works sued Vanderbilt for the sum of $2,957.15 which it claimed was due under a contract made by Vanderbilt on March 8, 1838. This contract called for the payment by Vanderbilt of $10,500 in three installments for the building of an engine for the steamboat "Wave." Vanderbilt paid $7,900, but refused to pay the remainder, on the ground that braces to the connecting rods were not supplied. These braces, it was brought out in court, cost only $75 or $100. The Supreme Court handed down a judgment against Vanderbilt. An appeal was taken by Vanderbilt, and Judge Nelson, in the Supreme Court, in October, 1841, affirmed that judgment.—Vanderbilt vs. Eagle Iron Works, Wendell's Reports, Cases in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, xxv: 665-668.] He was severe with the men who worked for him, compelling them to work long hours for little pay. He showed a singular ability in undermining competitors. They could not pay low wages but what he could pay lower; as rapidly as they set about reducing passenger and freight rates he would anticipate them. His policy at this time was to bankrupt competitors, and then having obtained a monopoly, to charge exorbitant rates. The public, which welcomed him as a benefactor in declaring cheaper rates and which flocked to patronize his line, had to pay dearly for their premature and short-sighted joy. For the first five years his profits, according to Croffut, reached $30,000 a year, doubling in successive years. By the time he was forty years old he ran steamboats to many cities on the coast, and had amassed a fortune of half a million dollars.

DRIVING OUT COMPETITORS.

Judging from the records of the times, one of his most effective means for harassing and driving out competitors was in bribing the New York Common Council to give him, and refuse them, dock privileges. As the city owned the docks, the Common Council had the exclusive right of determining to whom they should be leased. Not a year passed but what the ship, ferry and steamboat owners, the great landlords and other capitalists bribed the aldermen to lease or give them valuable city property. Many scandals resulted, culminating in the great scandal of 1853, when the Grand Jury, on February 26, handed up a presentment showing in detail how certain aldermen had received bribes for disposal of the city's water rights, pier privileges and other property, and how enormous sums had been expended in bribes to get railroad grants in the city. [Footnote: Proceedings of the New York Board of Aldermen, xlviii: 423-431.] Vanderbilt was not openly implicated in these frauds, no more than were the Astors, the Rhinelanders, the Goelets and other very rich men who prudently kept in the background, and who managed to loot the city by operating through go-betweens.

Vanderbilt's eulogists take great pains to elaborate upon his tremendous energy, sagacity and constructive enterprise, as though these were the exclusive qualities by which he got his fortune. Such a glittering picture, common in all of the usual biographies of rich men, discredits itself and is overthrown by the actual facts. The times in which Vanderbilt lived and thrived were not calculated to inspire the masses of people with respect for the trader's methods, although none could deny that the outcropping capitalists of the period showed a fierce vigor in overcoming obstacles of man and of nature, and in extending their conquests toward the outposts of the habitable globe.

If indomitable enterprise assured permanency of wealth then many of Vanderbilt's competitors would have become and remained multimillionaires. Vanderbilt, by no means possessed a monopoly of acquisitive enterprise; on every hand, and in every line, were men fully as active and unprincipled as he. Nearly all of these men, and scores of competitors in his own sphere—dominant capitalists in their day—have become well-nigh lost in the records of time; their descendants are in the slough of poverty, genteel or otherwise. Those times were marked by the intensest commercial competition; business was a labyrinth of sharp tricks and low cunning; the man who managed to project his head far above the rest not only had to practice the methods of his competitors but to overreach and outdo them. It was in this regard that Vanderbilt showed superior ability.

In the exploitation of the workers—forcing them to work for low wages and compelling them to pay high prices for all necessities— Vanderbilt was no different from all contemporaneous capitalists. Capitalism subsisted by this process. Almost all conventional writers, it is true, set forth that it was the accepted process of the day, implying that it was a condition acquiesced in by the employer and worker. This is one of the lies disseminated for the purpose of proving that the great fortunes were made by legitimate methods. Far from being accepted by the workers it was denounced and was openly fought by them at every auspicious opportunity.

Vanderbilt became one of the largest ship and steamboat builders in the United States and one of the most formidable employers of labor. At one time he had a hundred vessels afloat. Thousands of shipwrights, mechanics and other workers toiled for him fourteen and sixteen hours a day at $1.50 a day for many years. The actual purchasing power of this wage kept declining as the cost of rent and other necessaries of life advanced. This was notably so after the great gold discoveries in California, when prices of all commodities rose abnormally, and the workers in every trade were forced to strike for higher wages in order to live. Most of these strikes were successful, but their results as far as wages went were barren; the advance wrung from employers was by no means equal to the increased cost of living.

REGARDED AS A COMMERCIAL BUCCANEER.

The exploitation of labor, however, does not account for his success as a money maker. Many other men did the same, and yet in the vicissitudes of business went bankrupt; the realm of business was full of wrecks. Vanderbilt's success arose from his destructive tactics toward his competitors. He was regarded universally as the buccaneer of the shipping world. He leisurely allowed other men to build up profitable lines of steamboats, and he then proceeded to carry out methods which inevitably had one of two terminations: either his competitor had to buy him off at an exorbitant price, or he was left in undisputed possession. His principal biographer, Croffut, whose effusion is one long chant of praise, treats these methods as evidences of great shrewdness, and goes on: "His foible was 'opposition;' wherever his keen eye detected a line that was making a very large profit on its investment, he swooped down on it and drove it to the wall by offering a better service and lower rates." [Footnote: "The Vanderbilts and the Story of Their Fortune," by W. A. Croffut, 1886: 45-46.] This statement is only partially true; its omissions are more significant than its admissions.

Far from being the "constructive genius" that he is represented in every extant biographical work and note, Vanderbilt was the foremost mercantile pirate and commercial blackmailer of his day.

Harsh as these terms may seem, they are more than justified by the facts. His eulogists, in line with those of other rich men, weave a beautiful picture for the edification of posterity, of a broad, noble-minded man whose honesty was his sterling virtue, and whose splendid ability in opening up and extending the country's resources was rewarded with a great fortune and the thanks of his generation. This is utterly false. He who has the slightest knowledge of the low practices and degraded morals of the trading class and of the qualities which insured success, might at once suspect the spuriousness of this extravagant presentation, even if the vital facts were unavailable.

But there is no such difficulty. Obviously, for every one fraudulent commercial or political transaction that comes to public notice, hundreds and thousands of such transactions are kept in concealment. Enough facts, however, remain in official records to show the particular methods Vanderbilt used in getting together his millions. Yet no one hitherto seems to have taken the trouble to disinter them; even serious writers who cannot be accused of wealth worship or deliberate misstatement have all, without exception, borrowed their narratives of Vanderbilt's career from the fiction of his literary, newspaper and oratorical incense burners. And so it is that everywhere the conviction prevails that whatever fraudulent methods Vanderbilt employed in his later career, he was essentially an honest, straightforward man who was compelled by the promptings of sheer self-preservation to fight back at unscrupulous competitors or antagonists, and who innately was opposed to underhand work or fraud in any form. Vanderbilt is in every case portrayed as an eminently high-minded man who never stooped to dissimulation, deceit or treachery, and whose first millions, at any rate, were made in the legitimate ways of trade as they were then understood.

EXTORTION AND THEFT COMMON.

The truth is that the bulk of Vanderbilt's original millions were the proceeds of extortion, blackmail and theft.

In the established code of business the words extortion and theft had an unmistakable significance. Business men did not consider it at all dishonorable to oppress their workers; to manufacture and sell goods under false pretenses; to adulterate prepared foods and drugs; to demand the very highest prices for products upon which the very life of the people depended, and at a time when consumers needed them most; to bribe public officials and to hold up the Government in plundering schemes. These and many other practices were looked upon as commonplaces of ordinary trade.

But even as burglars will have their fine points of honor among themselves, so the business world set certain tacit limitations of action beyond which none could go without being regarded as violating the code. It was all very well as long as members of their own class plundered some other class, or fought one another, no matter how rapaciously, in accordance with understood procedure. But when any business man ventured to overstep these limitations, as Vanderbilt did, and levy a species of commercial blackmail to the extent of millions of dollars, then he was sternly denounced as an arch thief. If Vanderbilt had confined himself to the routine formulas of business, he might have gone down in failure. Many of the bankrupts were composed of business men who, while sharp themselves, were outgeneraled by abler sharpers. Vanderbilt was a master hand in despoiling the despoilers.



How did Vanderbilt manage to extort millions of dollars? The method was one of great simplicity; many of its features were brought out in the United States Senate in the debate of June 9, 1858, over the Mail Steamship bill. The Government had begun, more than a decade back, the policy of paying heavy subsidies to steamship companies for the transportation of mail. This subsidy, however, was not the only payment received by the steamship owners. In addition they were allowed what were called "postages"—the full returns from the amount of postage on the letters carried. Ocean postage at that time was enormous and burdensome, and was especially onerous upon a class of persons least able to bear it. About three-quarters of the letters transported by ships were written by emigrants. They were taxed the usual rate of twenty-four or twenty-nine cents for a single letter. In 1851 the amount received for trans-Atlantic postages was not less than a million dollars; three-fourths of this sum came directly from the working class.

THE CORRUPTION OF OFFICIALS.

To get these subsidies, in conjunction with the "postages," the steamship owners by one means or another corrupted postal officials and members of Congress. "I have noticed," said Senator Toombs, in a speech in the United States Senate on June 9, 1858, that there has never been a head of a Department strong enough to resist steamship contracts. I have noticed them here with your Whig party and your Democratic party for the last thirteen years, and I have never seen any head of a Department strong enough to resist these influences. ... Thirteen years' experience has taught me that wherever you allow the Postoffice or Navy Department to do anything which is for the benefit of contractors you may consider the thing as done. I could point to more than a dozen of these contracts. ... A million dollars a year is a power that will be felt. For ten years it amounts to ten million dollars, and I know it is felt. I know it perverts legislation. I have seen its influence; I have seen the public treasury plundered by it. ... [Footnote: The Congressional Globe, First Session, Thirty-fifth Congress, 1857-58, iii: 2839.]

By means of this systematic corruption the steamship owners received many millions of dollars of Government funds. This was all virtually plunder; the returns from the "postages" far more than paid them for the transportation of mails. And what became of these millions in loot? Part went in profits to the owners, and another part was used as private capital by them to build more and newer ships constantly. Practically none of Vanderbilt's ships cost him a cent; the Government funds paid for their building. In fact, a careful tracing of the history of all of the subsidized steamship companies proves that this plunder from the Government was very considerably more than enough to build and equip their entire lines.