Page:The complete works of Henry George vol. 1.djvu/213

 with which Surajah Dowlah hired of Warren Hastings an English force to assist him in desolating their country and decimating their people. And just as robbers unite to plunder in concert and divide the spoil, so do the trunk lines of railroad unite to raise rates and pool their earnings, or the Pacific roads form a combination with the Pacific Mail Steamship Company by which toll gates are virtually established on land and ocean. And just as Buckingham's creatures, under authority of the gold thread patent, searched private houses, and seized papers and persons for purposes of lust and extortion, so does the great telegraph company which, by the power of associated capital deprives the people of the United States of the full benefits of a beneficent invention, tamper with correspondence and crush out newspapers which offend it.

It is necessary only to allude to these things, not to dwell on them. Every one knows the tyranny and rapacity with which capital when concentrated in large amounts is frequently wielded to corrupt, to rob, and to destroy. What I wish to call the reader's attention to is that profits thus derived are not to be confounded with the legitimate returns of capital as an agent of production. They are for the most part to be attributed to a maladjustment of forces in the legislative department of government, and to a blind adherence to ancient barbarisms and the superstitious reverence for the technicalities of a narrow profession in the administration of law; while the general cause which in advancing communities tends, with the concentration of wealth, to the concentration of power, is the solution of the great problem we are seeking for, but have not yet found.

Any analysis will show that much of the profits which are, in common thought, confounded with interest are in reality due, not to the power of capital, but to the power of concentrated capital, or of concentrated capital