Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/362



Some of the richest copper deposits in the world are in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, most of them purporting to be owned or controlled by a great corporation called the Calumet and Hecla. This is a mining company that is also the holding concern for seventeen other mining companies, owns a railroad or two, some smelting works, some other profit-making devices and an organized system of politics the equal of any.

It is one of the richest and most profitable enterprises in the world. Except for a few railroads like those of Mr. Hill, the Calumet and Hecla has made more money on a smaller investment than any other corporation that ever existed. In the sixteen years ending with 1912 the smallest annual dividend has been 80 per cent, and in other years it has been as much as 400 per cent.

As these dividends were declared upon a capital stock less than half of which was ever paid for, a nominal dividend of 400 per cent was an actual dividend of 800 per cent.

On every dollar ever invested in this company more than one hundred dollars have been paid in dividends, while millions of dollars of other profits have been diverted to the purchase of additional profit-making ventures. With a par value of $25.00 on which only $12.00 was paid in, the shares have now a value of $540.00 each.

This gigantic cornucopia is owned by the Shaws, Agassizs and Higginsons, leading families of Boston; and besides their dividends, they pay themselves enormous salaries as officers and directors of Calumet and Hecla, and of the seventeen subsidiary companies. Says Russell:

The Calumet and Hecla barony comprises one hundred and seventeen miles. There is every reason to believe that it occupies and has occupied this land without rightful title, and all the vast wealth it has taken therefrom really belongs to the people of the United States.

There is also good reason to believe that it has consistently violated its charter, and is now engaged in doing so every day and every hour of every day: a fact that will not in the least astonish you when you come to learn of some of its other activities, but that adds a rarely piquant taste to the pious exclamations of its attorneys on the subject of law-breaking.

And now, what of the men who worked for these copper barons? They were ill-paid and ill-treated, badly housed, worked for long hours at peril of life and limb; they lived in a community absolutely dominated by their masters; there was no other industry or source of wealth, and the politicians and the courts, the newspapers and the churches—everything was owned by "Copper." It is the old, sickening story of the over