Page:The Wizard of Wall Street and his Wealth.djvu/176

 *nopoly. Its condition is such that it cannot exist with profit to its stockholders with a strong competition in the field. Thus it is a grand aggregation of small companies. It has absorbed and will probably continue to absorb every rival in the field. Gould himself rode into control on the back of a competing company. This was early in 1881. His version of the story is given in his testimony to the Senate Committee on Labor and Education.

"I am interested in the telegraph," he told the committee, "for the railroad and telegraph systems go hand in hand, as it were, integral parts of a great. civilization. I naturally became acquainted with the telegraph business and gradually became interested in it. I thought well of it as an investment, and I kept increasing my interests. When the Union Pacific was built I had an interest in a company called the Atlantic and Pacific, and I endeavored to make that a rival to the Western Union. We extended it considerably, but found it rather uphill work. We saw that our interest lay more with the Western Union. Through that we could reach every part of the country, and through a small company we could not; so we made an offer to sell to Western Union the control of the Atlantic and Pacific. At that time a very dear friend of mine was the manager, and I supposed that he would be made the manager of the Western Union; but after the consolidation was perfected it was not done, and I made up my mind that he should be at the head of as good a company as I had taken him from. The