Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/285

Rh at the same time the brevity which short-hands in general possess, the use of it for all purposes would be immensely advantageous to mankind." A letter from Herbert Spencer to his father, and one from his father to him, both written early in 1843, are reproduced in photoprint, as specimens of continuous writing by this system.

larger part of this book is taken up with the detailed history of the Standard Oil Trust, the facts being cited from records of courts and from the testimony presented to congressional and State legislative committees. While Mr. Lloyd has written an arraignment, and is at no pains to conceal his hatred of this trust, he offers a mass of evidence which in volume and significance is fairly startling. Abating all that in his book is due to the heat of a prosecuting attorney, enough remains to show that aggregated wealth in this country has been and is grossly abused to the public oppression. The vast power of the Standard Oil Trust began in the dishonesty of railroad managers, who, interested in the dividends of the trust, betrayed their own employers, the stockholders in the railroads, and not only carried oil for the trust at specially low rates, but at times paid to the trust the cash taken from its rivals in the shape of exorbitant rates. Advantaged by such plunder as this, the progress of the trust to colossal wealth was rapid; competition with it became impossible; and, passing from the carriage and refining of oil to production, it is now in possession of the principal oil fields of America. With the true genius of conquest it soon discarded the railroads for pipe lines, building these with the capital placed in its coffers by the railroads themselves; and if, as the more economical mode of transportation, the pipe lines were inevitable, it is still true that their introduction was hastened by the suicidal treachery of the railroad chieftains.

It is an everyday assumption that direct pecuniary interest is an efficient check upon the wastes and frauds of servants. This assumption is contradicted in every page of the history of the Standard Oil Trust. Through supineness or through the bribery of leading representatives the stockholders of the railroads concerned have been absolutely indifferent to the wholesale and repeatedly exposed theft of their property. In two notable instances—in Columbus, Miss., and in Toledo, Ohio—the communities withstood the trust manfully and succeeded. These two cases are the only ones of importance where, by trusting each other, the members of American communities have managed to preserve industrial freedom threatened by the trust.

Mr. Lloyd has no remedy to suggest for the abuses he describes with so much passionate force. He looks only to arousing public indignation by a simple recital of the facts.

are always some members of a community who, like Grant Allen, prefer their science dry; but there are also others, it is impossible to judge how large this class may be, that like scientific truths flavored and put up in palatable packages. To please the latter is manifestly the purpose of this book. The aim to arouse interest in the wonders of Nature is a worthy one, and, on Jesuitical principles, it may be allowable to give hypodermic injections of science, but the sine qua non of all this is that pure science only should be thus instilled, for if facts be diluted with flights of fancy the recipient may in the end fail to recognize what is truth and what is not.

In the romance before us we are introduced to the world in the year 2000, and to the office of a company whose business it is to straighten the axis of the earth. This it endeavors to do by shifting the superfluous weight of water from the pole nearest the sea to the one leaving it. The Arctic Ocean is alternately pumped out and replenished, the power being furnished by dynamos at Niagara and the Bay of Fundy. On the Antarctic continent the crust is thin, so energy is obtained from sunken boilers which supply superheated steam from the earth's interior.

Several friends "tired of being stuck to this cosmical speck with its monotonous