Page:William Zebulon Foster - The Railroaders' Next Step, Amalgamation (1922).djvu/9

Rh would be to misrepresent their nefarious business ethics. Their policy is to grab everything in sight that is not nailed down, no matter whom it may belong to. They are impartial in the matter. They rob each other as freely as they do outsiders. A time-honored device to do this is for the controlling clique in a company to milk the rest of the stockholders (and thus the people at large) by setting up an outside company, owned by themselves, to do construction and repair work for the parent railroad and then voting it contracts at fabulous prices. Thus the grafters have sucked in millions and millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains, and thus many a railroad has been bled white, thrown into a receiver's hands and left for the people to re-finance. We see the same policy in operation at the present time, with the railroads letting out immense quantities of work to "independent" equipment companies while their own shops and workers stand idle.

Bitter, dog-eat-dog wars have raged between rival interests for many years over the control of the railroads. In these brutal encounters the law of fang and claw prevail. Everything from petty larceny to murder is considered legitimate. The struggle for the Erie was typical: Originally this road was built by public subscription, but as usual a bunch of thieves got title to it. They sucked it dry with the customary methods, and finally lost it to one Daniel Drew by a mortgage foreclosure. Drew used the road for speculative purposes, making millions. But the greedy Vanderbilt, whom Gustavus Myers calls "the foremost blackmailer of his time, the plunderer of the National Treasury in the Civil War, the arch-briber and corruptionist," outwitted him, ruined him and seized the road. He made the mistake, however, of putting Drew, Jay Gould and Jim Fisk in charge of it. These worthies promptly double-crossed him and, by an illegal issue of stock, got control. Vanderbilt's crooked judge thereupon issued an order against them. But they fled his jurisdiction with $7,000,000 in cash, the proceeds of their robbery. Later on