Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/602

580 or San Francisco, or any city or town large enough to make a dot on the map, or any one of the ten thousand points reachable from every one of these, there are certainly half a dozen lines of railway at his option; and if there are two points in the United States between which there is but one means of transportation, it is because the points themselves are of such exceedingly minor importance that a second means has entirely failed to be a temptation to local capitalists. I once happened upon a railroad on the top of the Alleghany Mountains, five miles in length, called the Wilcox and Burning-Well Railroad, running between a tannery and a saw-mill, which—as there was no other means of going from one to the other except by taking an axe and a compass and tempting the aboriginal forest—might, I think, be fairly called a monopoly, especially since the owner of the railroad was also the owner of both the terminal tannery and the terminal saw-mill. But the great majority of American railways are, just now, competitors rather than monopolists, and, if gigantic at all, are gigantic competitors. It is to be admitted, of course, that to construct, maintain, and operate a "gigantic" railway, gigantic corporations may not be unnecessary.

Now, railways "dominate," says Mr. Hudson, by being these gigantic corporations against which units have no chance. But just as capital is the storage of labor, so a corporation is the aggregate of units, and if units can combine to "dominate" other and uncombined units, why can not these other units combine to resist the domination? Mr. Hudson does not recognize such a question, suggests no device by which the unit unassisted by capital can equal in strength the unit when so assisted, nor any reason why the units incorporated for transportation purposes should not compete for the transportation business of the units not incorporated for transportation purposes. This word "competition," however, is no favorite of Mr. Hudson's. He immensely prefers "domination": and properly so, too, since in the employment of the latter word lie not only his premises, but the conclusions at which he assumes to arrive. The railways, concreted, "dominate" the republic (that is to say, all the United States except the railways), and therefore, since they "dominate" by doing the transportation business of those not in that business, the only safety is to reverse the situation, so that the units not incorporated for transportation purposes should hereafter dominate the units who are so incorporated. In other words: Let our railroads, by all means, be run by men who do not understand railroading, and let those who do understand the running of railroads step down and out at once.

But why should those individually concerned in railway management step down and out? Why, says Mr. Hudson, because several of them have accumulated enormous fortunes; fortunes fabulous, even when compared with all the other private fortunes in the world. But whence come these ten or a dozen (if so many) vast fortunes?