Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/605

Rh by making the rich richer and the poor poorer; and this, principally, by piling up vast accumulations of wealth in the hands of the very few. Mr, Hudson is wary enough to see that railroads, not being per se illegal, the accident and consequence are not illegal; he, therefore, argues deftly that the railways, although legal, are illegally handled by their managers. This illegality he separates into five counts—that the transportation business, legitimate in itself, has been made pernicious to public and private rights, and "dominates" them by certain imported incidents, viz., by—

Mr. Hudson does not add to these—sleeping, hotel, and parlor-car companies, railway-lighting companies, and all the numerous other auxiliaries to modern railway management, which save the time and economize the capital, while they accommodate the patronage of railways. I know not why, but, since he has left them out of the indictment, we will follow his example. But Mr. Hudson does pause just here—by what logical process is not apparent—to fulminate to the length of many solid pages over and against the Standard Oil Company, its history, career, and the procedure by which, before the days of "pools," it was able to force favorable contracts upon the railways to its own vast advantage; accumulating thereby assets almost as enormous as either of the three or four private fortunes in which Mr. Hudson sees such imminent peril to the republic. As we are just now considering the railways, perhaps we might as well leave out the oil company. We may admit, I think, however, in passing, that the Standard Company was an accident—a thing by itself, like the moon or the Gulf Stream—from whose existence even a possibility of another can. not be predicated, since the present system of "pooling" associations would render its repetition practically impossible. Mr. Hudson is perfectly right in announcing that this great corporation is not a charity or an eleemosynary foundation of any sort; that it does business for the enrichment of its own stockholders rather than in behalf of those of its rivals: that it takes all it can get—is soulless, grasping, and selfish. That it has been engineered by men of brains until it has become in certain localities a practical monopoly may also be conceded. That, so long as the laws under which it is incorporated permit other incorporations for like purposes, it is a monopoly, legally or derivately speaking, I am afraid must be denied.

Premising merely that railways are not always the personal property of their officers, but that their ownership, as a rule, shifts with every sale of stocks made in Wall Street or on the 'Change of a dozen capitals—and that, in Mr. Hudson's formula (page .5), "of the