FORETOKENS OF OUR LORD'S RETURN
By George W. Rine
TYRANNY OF COMBINED MILLIONS.
A UNANIMITY of conviction obtains among all sane thinkers that the present overshadowing menace to the permanency of our republican institutions is an economic one. It is found primarily in the consolidating of wealth and the sinister methods by which this wealth is amassed, grouped, controlled, and used. The accumulation of riches is deeply cut with marks of modernized brigandage, and their use is very generally characterized by ruthless oppression, and a disregard of the rights of others. The all-pervasive predatory spirit of the present-day realm of trade and finance has developed into a science, and its master-minds are found among the most opulent and influential men in the land. The biggest fly in the ointment of these halcyon days of prosperity is the remorseless rapacity and the blind despotism of centralized corporate wealth. The Marvelously Complete Concentration of Wealth and Power.
In The World's Work for December, 1903, Mr. Sereno S. Pratt categorically affirms that one-twelfth of the estimated wealth of the nation is represented at the meeting of the board of directors of the United States Steel Corporation. They are in practical control of more than 200 other titanic industrial syndicates. These corporations operate one-half of the railroad mileage of the United States. They control approximately all the mining and distribution of the nation's coal. The dominant telegraph system, the street railways of the largest eight cities in the country, and one of the leading express companies, are represented in the Steel Trust board. This group of directors includes also the men in control of five insurance companies, with assets of upward of a billion dollars. These same men speak for the five richest banks and the ten most powerful trust companies in New York City. Each of three of these banks is the head of an interminable chain of financial institutions that ramify all parts of the United States. The master-spirits of telephone, electric, real-estate, cable, publishing, and mercantile companies sit at this same board table. In one sense, the twenty-four men who constitute this board, are the most extraordinary group in the world. They control corporations whose capitalization aggregates nearly $10,000,000,000, an amount far greater than the combined public debts of the United States, Great Britain, and France. It is the concentration of power vested in this knot of money barons that makes them loom so portentously to the public eye. "But," says Dr. Strong, "this board of directors is guided by the executive and finance committees, which in turn are largely directed by their chairmen, who are probably selected by the great banker who organized the corporation and in large part sways its policy." (Italics mine.) Those vast and diversified industries of the nation, which come under the category of manufactures, represent a capitalization of $9,900,000,000. But all the really important ones, those which dominate the markets, are absolutely under the control of half a hundred "captains of industry." Recent investigations show that the control of all the great banks and other monetary institutions of this country has gradually passed into the hands of a small group of capitalists, who, in consequence, have the dangerously plutocratic power to regulate the flow of credit in the commercial world of America. Respecting the highly centralized control of the banking power of the nation, the Rev. Dr. Strong says: "In the last analysis it is found that there are actually only two main influences, and that these are centered in Mr. Morgan and Mr. Rockefeller." Dr. Strong shows that Mr. Morgan dominates capital which can be expressed in approximate figures at $6,268,171,300. Congressman Charles E. Littlefield stated in a recent address that there are 793 trusts capitalized at more than fourteen billion dollars, not including the railways capitalized at twelve billion dollars more. All-Inclusive Railroad Trust.
Of the 215,000 miles of railway in the United States, capitalized at the fabulous figures given above, ninety-five per cent. is under the exclusive sway of six "communities of interest" or titanic alliances. The famous statistician, Mr. John Moody, writes that the money kings that are at the head of, and entirely dominate, this Atlantean railroad trust are J. P. Morgan, John D. and William Rockefeller, W. K. and F. W. Vanderbilt, Geo. J. Gould, A. J. Cassatt, J. J. Hill, E. H. Harriman, and the Moore Brothers. The total earnings of these allied railways for 1904 slightly exceeded $2,000,000,000, or one-third as much as the aggregate wealth of the United States in 1842. Mr. Moody adds: "The control is becoming more and more concentrated, as the number of capitalists controlling the railways is becoming smaller and smaller." Anent the present irresistible tendency to merge the railway systems of the United States, the San Francisco Chronicle significantly says:
The apologists for consolidation reason about as follows: There is economic saving in consolidation; all economic saving is distributed through society; therefore, consolidation is in the interest of society. That seems sound reasoning, but it is not. The minor premise is not necessarily true, and as a matter of fact is not true, as is evident by the enormous accumulations of wealth not only in single control but in single ownership. If the premises were sound the conclusion would not necessarily follow, for the social consequences of consolidation are not considered, and there may be economic gain side by side with social loss. At any rate, the people have the ballot and will not endure this continued consolidation. There can be no such concentration of power without abuses and oppression. Those capitalists who are promoting these consolidations are inviting trouble. It may be socialism. It may be the taxation of great fortunes out of existence. It may be something else. It will be trouble. Monopoly of Invaluable City Franchises.
There are now in this country eleven gigantic franchise trusts, each of which is capitalized at considerably more than $100,000,000; there are also twenty-three similar corporations, each capitalized at $50,000,000 or more, and ninety-five additional franchise "trustlets," each representing a capitalization of $5,000,000 or more. On the face of it, the foregoing statement would seem to prove that the franchise wealth of the country is under widely diversified ownership and control. But it is important to remember that all these corporations, large and small, are so deviously interlocked that, in effect, they are dominated by less than a score of the master-spirits of the "Empire of Finance." Crushing Monopoly of the World's Tobacco Industry.
No more telling illustration of the dazzling swiftness with which an infant commercial company can be nursed into an all-inclusive and crushing monopolistic trust, can be found than the short but romantic history of the American Tobacco Company, popularly known as "The Tobacco Trust." The Company began its career in 1890 as a modest corporation of Eastern tobacco manufacturers, with a capital of but $25,000,000. In the first fourteen years of its history it developed into a despotically rapacious world-monopoly of every form of tobacco production and distribution, with its capital swollen to the fabulous sum of $502,000,000. Its sphere of operations to-day reaches practically into every country on the globe. It grows the raw tobacco, transports it, converts it into all the diversified forms for consumption, and distributes to the four quarters of the earth. At its inception, in 1890, it controlled only eight plants; in 1904 it had become the master of 150 plants. It has absorbed to itself ninety per cent. of the tobacco industry of the United States and not less than sixty per cent. of the industry in all other parts of the world. It is said to have stifled more competing companies than any other trust except the Standard Oil Company. It is a conspicuous example of the kind of monopoly that has been succinctly described as a combination of "special privilege, efficient labor, and unscrupulous brain power." Up to this point in the preparation of this article, my aim has been simply to adduce a few typical illustrations of the resistless tendency toward the concentration of the world's wealth into the coffers of a comparatively few persons, who are gifted with a genius for finance. Equally apt illustrations could be given almost without limit, but would afford very little, if any, additional information as to the principle involved. Specific Instances of Monopoly Oppression.
The Los Angeles Times truthfully declares: "Standard Oil methods are well known to be utterly unscrupulous, utterly relentless, and utterly selfish." More than one writer on economic subjects have been telling their readers that, during the past six months, the Standard Oil Company has acquired so preponderating an influence in railroad management that it can dictate freight rates almost as irrevocably as it dictates the price of oil. Of course, what is true of the Oil trust must be true of the steel, the sugar, the copper, the beef, the coal, and other giant trusts, inasmuch as they constitute a "close community of interests." The insatiable greed and the utter moral turpitude of the Oil trust was made glaringly evident at the time of the great anthracite coal strike, in the winter of 1902. Up to that time the company had been wholesaling oil in New York City at a handsome profit at seven and one-half cents a gallon. When the stress of the coal famine compelled the people to use oil for fuel, the trust promptly raised the price four cents a gallon; and, as pointed out at the time by newspapers, this increase in price alone amounted to more than $90,000,000 wrung from the helpless misery and distress of the people by the richest corporation in the world, simply because through unlawful and immoral methods this financial leviathan had been able to crush competition and thus place the people completely at the mercy of its wanton extortion. Naturally, the head of the trust, as its heaviest stockholder, "reaped the lion's share of the blood money."9 President Cassatt, of the Pennsylvania Railroad, testified before the New York Investigating Committee "that in eighteen months the railways had paid to the Standard the sum of $10,000,000 in rebates." Yes, we have the unimpeachable records of at least three State Courts, that it was chiefly upon the all-powerful, but utterly iniquitous, rebate that the great Oil King founded and developed to perfection the remorseless monopoly of Standard Oil. But Standard Oil has actually outgrown the need of this flagrantly lawless artifice. Its preponderating influence in the control of railways enables it to virtually dictate transportation rates. This statement is not mere conjecture. In the April number of The World To-Day, Mr. C. A. Prouty, of the Inter-State Commerce Commission, states, in substance, that most people assume that the rebate is the principal evil in trust oppression. In the past this has been true. "The great trusts and monopolies exercise to-day such control over railway-management, that they can adjust rates in their own interest. The Standard Oil Company no longer accepts rebates—it makes the rates themselves; and the discriminations in its favor are worth enormous sums annually to that monopoly." The Rev. Dr. Gladden declares that it is not merely on account of what this gigantic power has done in the past; it is on account of what it is doing to-day that it ought to be counted a public enemy. "It is now, as it always has been, an oppressor of the people. Its methods of robbery are more genteel and much more cowardly than those of the highway man or the pirate, but they are not less flagitious." Dr. Gladden declares further: "The man who, upon a railway directory, exerts his influence to establish rates or policies by which he aggrandizes himself by despoiling his business competitors is, in the sight of God, just as truly a robber as the man who puts his pistol to your head in a dark alley." He believes truly that unless the people can learn to discern and punish these cryptic injustices which are woven into the very fabric of our modern industrial system, there will be no hope for liberty here except as the result of a revolution. Governor La Follette of Wisconsin not long since alleged that there is not an important trust in the United States which does not have the assistance of the railroads in destroying its competitors in business. [The remainder of this article deals with the history and work of the great harvester trust, the beef-trust vampire, and the meaning of these amassings of millions.]