Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/354

340 connection or that were distinctly hostile. Railroads sprang up at first in subservience of local interests, and have been welded and are being welded together in subservience of general interests. The logic of economy and public advantage has overridden the individualities of men, the strifes of communities, the ignorances and prejudices of the public mind. Railroad management becomes less and less local, and more and more an affair dictated by events and beyond the grasp of any one mind or any number of minds that can act in unison. The great names in railroad affairs are not great by reason of overpowering genius, but by reason of the consolidations forced by events, the elimination of the men representing the smaller interests, and by the concentration of power in the hands of him who by his superiority over his associates or competitors, or by something fortuitous, becomes the representative of the combined interests.

The public mind does not grudge extraordinary rewards and power to genius and great public service, but it is galled to see such thrown by circumstances into the hands of men only actuated by personal aims. When such a condition of things grows into a national system; when in substance empires in domain have been parceled out to a few individuals, when we suspect that a few individuals are absorbing the growing wealth of the country, and perhaps more—the past acquisitions; when a plutocracy threatens to become greater than political parties, to wield more power and become superior to the chosen representatives of the people, it is high time to sift the character of their tenure, to inquire whether we have become a nation of Bombastes Furiosos in civil affairs; whether the Fourth-of-July oratory of past generations was a mere exercitation of the cerebrum and diaphragm of budding orators or traditionary wind-bags; whether if Providence has favored infants, drunkards, and the United States, as has been intimated by our European fellow-men, has it not withdrawn, or is it not rapidly withdrawing, its favors from the United States? While European nations have been growing toward a greater diffusion of civil rights, in the United States the sovereignty of the individual man has declined, and wealth and a class that wealth creates have become known at the polls and in the Legislatures; and the courts themselves, the very flower of the virtue and intelligence of the people, are strongly charged in some cases with contamination.

Consolidation, consolidation, consolidation, is the trend in the development of transportation. This is so, in spite of the competitive principle on which our nation has sought to stand. This nation has sought to look to no rulers of great and long-continued importance. It has stood on the ground of reinstating its rulers with power at short intervals; this emphasizes the idea that the sovereign power rests with the people. Next to this, the dominating idea on which we have rested has been that competition among our citizens would control our affairs. The theory of no-government—in that part of it which does