Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/351

Rh 8. The large salaries paid high railroad officials is to a great degree only a legalized method of giving them an important part of the emoluments received. Their positions being free from the strain of personal competition and risk of capital, such as attend the business man, and without the pressure of social expenses and duties, such as rest upon the high government official, and frequently destitute of requirements of expert skill and professional knowledge, such as often command prizes of the highest kind, they are altogether without a parallel as remunerated positions.

Electric, gas, and other companies represent branches of transportation, of which railroads are the great representatives, and much is true of these companies that is true of railroad companies, and all stand on much the same ground regarding salaries paid to their high officials and in their general effects.

In contrast to these advantages accruing to railroad organizers and managers, the advantages that are supposed to accrue by the organization of railroad and all other stock companies, and to which prospectuses however flattering, are confined, are—

1. The profit on the investment through rise in the value of the property, and dividends to those who give valuable considerations for stocks and bonds.

2. The indirect benefit that will accrue to other properties, and the public convenience and advantage that will be derived from the operations of the company.

Where legitimacy begins and where it ends in such organization and management is a question of casuistry in particular cases, but there has been swerving enough from what is legitimate to make it the startling and pronounced feature of American commercial life for the past twenty-five years.

As the result of such illegitimacy, as the leading cause, what do we find?

We find Pelion piled on Ossa in the matter of private wealth.

We find the ideas of equality and simplicity on which the Government was founded stultified in the house of their friends.

We find fiery zeal and many successes in making millions and multiples of millions, and the hardships of acquiring a competence, increasing.

We find a class that exceed any class of officers in the Government in the importance of tenure and their power—imperium in imperio.

We find the individual less assertive than a generation ago of his independence, and the typical, prosperous citizen eats the bread of dependence upon a corporation, or controls one or more.

We find an important number of the influential members of the class that is and has been most influential in this country since the organization of the Government, lawyers—the only learned class active in affairs, officers of courts, the chief legislators and law-makers of the