WEALTH AGAINST COMMONWEALTH
BY
HENRY DEMAREST LLOYD
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1894
Copyright, 1894, by Henry Demarest Lloyd.
_All rights reserved._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. "THERE ARE NONE"--"THEY ARE LEGION" 1
II. CUT OFF FROM FIRE 9
III. PROHIBITION THAT PROHIBITS 20
IV. "SQUARE EATERS" 30
V. STRIKING OIL 38
VI. "NOT TO EXCEED HALF" 61
VII. "YOU ARE NOT TO REFINE" 73
VIII. "NO!" 84
IX. WHO PIPED AND WHO DANCED 104
X. CHEAPENING TRANSPORTATION 118
XI. SONG OF THE BARREL 128
XII. UNFINISHED MARCH TO THE SEA 152
XIII. PURCHASE OF PEACE 166
XIV. "I WANT TO MAKE OIL" 182
XV. SYMPATHETICAL CO-OPERATION 199
XVI. "TURN ANOTHER SCREW" 212
XVII. IN THE INTEREST OF ALL 227
XVIII. ORDINARY SUPPLY AND DEMAND 243
XIX. THROUGH THE WOMAN'S EYES 257
XX. TAKEN FROM THE JURY BY THE JUDGE 272
XXI. CRIME CHEAPER THAN COMPETITION 285
XXII. ANOTHER TALE OF TWO CITIES 299
XXIII. FREEDOM OF THE CITY 313
XXIV. HIGH FINANCE 326
XXV. A SUNDAY IN JUNE 341
XXVI. TOLEDO VICTOR 352
XXVII. "YOU ARE A--SENATOR" 369
XXVIII. FOR "OLD GLORY" AND AN--APPROPRIATION 389
XXIX. "THE COMMODITY IS NOT SO GOOD AS BEFORE"--_Coke_ 405
XXX. "TO GET ALL WE CAN" 420
XXXI. ALL THE WORLD UNDER ONE HAT 432
XXXII. "NOT BUSINESS" 455
XXXIII. THE SMOKELESS REBATE 474
XXXIV. THE OLD SELF-INTEREST 494
XXXV. AND THE NEW 516
APPENDIX--PARTIAL LIST OF TRADE COMBINATIONS, OR TRUSTS 537
INDEX 545
WEALTH AGAINST COMMONWEALTH
CHAPTER I
"THERE ARE NONE"--"THEY ARE LEGION"
Nature is rich; but everywhere man, the heir of nature, is poor. Never
in this happy country or elsewhere--except in the Land of Miracle,
where "they did all eat and were filled"--has there been enough of
anything for the people. Never since time began have all the sons
and daughters of men been all warm, and all filled, and all shod and
roofed. Never yet have all the virgins, wise or foolish, been able to
fill their lamps with oil.
The world, enriched by thousands of generations of toilers and
thinkers, has reached a fertility which can give every human being
a plenty undreamed of even in the Utopias. But between this plenty
ripening on the boughs of our civilization and the people hungering for
it step the "cornerers," the syndicates, trusts, combinations, with
the cry of "over-production"--too much of everything. Holding back the
riches of earth, sea, and sky from their fellows who famish and freeze
in the dark, they declare to them that there is too much light and
warmth and food. They assert the right, for their private profit, to
regulate the consumption by the people of the necessaries of life, and
to control production, not by the needs of humanity, but by the desires
of a few for dividends. The coal syndicate thinks there is too much
coal. There is too much iron, too much lumber, too much flour--for this
or that syndicate.
The majority have never been able to buy enough of anything; but this
minority have too much of everything to sell.
Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty. "The splendid
empire of Charles V.," says Motley, "was erected upon the grave of
liberty." Our bignesses, cities, factories, monopolies, fortunes,
which are our empires, are the obesities of an age gluttonous beyond
its powers of digestion. Mankind are crowding upon each other in the
centres, and struggling to keep each other out of the feast set by the
new sciences and the new fellowships. Our size has got beyond both our
science and our conscience. The vision of the railroad stockholder is
not far-sighted enough to see into the office of the General Manager;
the people cannot reach across even a ward of a city to rule their
rulers; Captains of Industry "do not know" whether the men in the
ranks are dying from lack of food and shelter; we cannot clean our
cities nor our politics; the locomotive has more man-power than all the
ballot-boxes, and mill-wheels wear out the hearts of workers unable to
keep up beating time to their whirl. If mankind had gone on pursuing
the ideals of the fighter, the time would necessarily have come when
there would have been only a few, then only one, and then none left.
This is what we are witnessing in the world of livelihoods. Our ideals
of livelihood are ideals of mutual deglutition. We are rapidly reaching
the stage where in each province only a few are left; that is the
key to our times. Beyond the deep is another deep. This era is but a
passing phase in the evolution of industrial Cæsars, and these Cæsars
will be of a new type--corporate Cæsars.
For those who like the perpetual motion of a debate in which neither
of the disputants is looking at the same side of the shield, there are
infinite satisfactions in the current controversy as to whether there
is any such thing as "monopoly." "There are none," says one side.
"They are legion," says the other. "The idea that there can be such a
thing is absurd," says one, who with half a dozen associates controls
the source, the price, the quality, the quantity of nine-tenths of a
great necessary of life. But "There will soon be a trust for every
production, and a master to fix the price for every necessity of
life," said the Senator who framed the United States Anti-Trust Law.
This difference as to facts is due to a difference in the definitions
through which the facts are regarded. Those who say "there are none"
hold with the Attorney-General of the United States and the decision
he quotes from the highest Federal court which has yet passed on this
question[1] that no one has a monopoly unless there is a "disability"
or "restriction" imposed by law on all who would compete. A syndicate
that had succeeded in bottling for sale all the air of the earth
would not have a monopoly in this view, unless there were on the
statute-books a law forbidding every one else from selling air. No
others could get air to sell; the people could not get air to breathe,
but there would be no monopoly because there is no "legal restriction"
on breathing or selling the atmosphere.
Excepting in the manufacture of postage-stamps, gold dollars, and a
few other such cases of a "legal restriction," there are no monopolies
according to this definition. It excludes the whole body of facts
which the people include in their definition, and dismisses a great
public question by a mere play on words. The other side of the shield
was described by Judge Barrett, of the Supreme Court of New York. A
monopoly he declared to be "any combination the tendency of which is
to prevent competition in its broad and general sense, and to control
and thus at will enhance prices to the detriment of the public.... Nor
need it be permanent or complete. It is enough that it may be even
temporarily and partially successful. The question in the end is, Does
it inevitably tend to public injury?"[2]
Those who insist that "there are none" are the fortunate ones who came
up to the shield on its golden side. But common usage agrees with
the language of Judge Barrett, because it exactly fits a fact which
presses on common people heavily, and will grow heavier before it grows
lighter.
The committee of Congress investigating trusts in 1889 did not report
any list of these combinations to control markets, "for the reason
that new ones are constantly forming, and that old ones are constantly
extending their relations so as to cover new branches of the business
and invade new territories."
It is true that such a list, like a dictionary, would begin to be
wrong the moment it began to appear. But though only an instantaneous
photograph of the whirlwind, it would give an idea, to be gained
in no other way, of a movement shadowing two hemispheres. In an
incredible number of the necessaries and luxuries of life, from meat
to tombstones, some inner circle of the "fittest" has sought, and very
often obtained, the sweet power which Judge Barrett found the sugar
trust had: It "can close every refinery at will, close some and open
others, limit the purchases of raw material (thus jeopardizing, and in
a considerable degree controlling, its production), artificially limit
the production of refined sugar, enhance the price to enrich themselves
and their associates at the public expense, and depress the price when
necessary to crush out and impoverish a foolhardy rival."
Corners are "acute" attacks of that which combinations exhibit as
chronic. First a corner, then a pool, then a trust, has often been
the genesis. The last stage, when the trust throws off the forms of
combination and returns to the simpler dress of corporations, is
already well along. Some of the "sympathetical co-operations" on record
have no doubt ceased to exist. But that they should have been attempted
is one of the signs of the time, and these attempts are repeated again
and again until success is reached.
The line of development is from local to national, and from national
to international. The amount of capital changes continually with the
recrystallizations in progress. Not less than five hundred million
dollars is in the coal combination, which our evidence shows to have
flourished twenty-two years; that in oil has nearly if not quite two
hundred millions; and the other combinations in which its members are
leaders foot up hundreds of millions more. Hundreds of millions of
dollars are united in the railroads and elevators of the Northwest
against the wheat-growers. In cattle and meat there are not less than
one hundred millions; in whiskey, thirty-five millions; and in beer
a great deal more than that; in sugar, seventy-five millions; in
leather, over a hundred millions; in gas, hundreds of millions. At
this writing a union is being negotiated of all the piano-makers in
the United States, to have a capital of fifty millions. Quite beyond
ordinary comprehension is the magnitude of the syndicates, if there is
more than one, which are going from city to city, consolidating all
the gas-works, electric-lighting companies, street-railways in each
into single properties, and consolidating these into vast estates for
central corporations of capitalists, controlling from metropolitan
offices the transportation of the people of scores of cities. Such
a syndicate negotiating in December, 1892, for the control of the
street-railways of Brooklyn, was said by the New York _Times_, "on
absolute authority, to have subscribed $23,000,000 towards that end,
before a single move had been made or a price set on a single share
of stock." It was in the same hands as those busy later in gathering
together the coal-mines of Nova Scotia and putting them under American
control. There are in round numbers ten thousand millions of dollars
claiming dividends and interest in the railroads of the United
States. Every year they are more closely pooled. The public saw them
marshalled, as by one hand, in the maintenance of the high passenger
rates to the World's Fair in the summer of 1893.
Many thousands of millions of dollars are represented in these
centralizations. It is a vast sum, and yet is but a minority of our
wealth.
Laws against these combinations have been passed by Congress and by
many of the States. There have been prosecutions under them by the
State and Federal governments. The laws and the lawsuits have alike
been futile.
In a few cases names and form of organization have been changed, in
consequence of legal pursuit. The whiskey, sugar, and oil trusts had
to hang out new signs. But the thing itself, the will and the power to
control markets, livelihoods, and liberties, and the toleration of this
by the public--this remains unimpaired; in truth, facilitated by the
greater secrecy and compactness which have been the only results of the
appeal to law.
The Attorney-General of the national government gives a large part of
his annual report for 1893 to showing "what small basis there is for
the popular impression" "that the aim and effect of this statute" (the
Anti-Trust Law) "are to prohibit and prevent those aggregations of
capital which are so common at the present day, and which sometimes
are on so large a scale as to practically control all the branches
of an extensive industry." This executive says of the action of the
"co-ordinate" Legislature: "It would not be useful, even if it were
possible, to ascertain the precise purposes of the framers of the
statute." He is the officer charged with the duty of directing the
prosecutions to enforce the law; but he declares that since, among
other reasons, "all ownership of property is a monopoly, ... any
literal application of the provisions of the statute is out of the
question." Nothing has been accomplished by all these appeals to the
legislatures and the courts, except to prove that the evil lies deeper
than any public sentiment or public intelligence yet existent, and is
stronger than any public power yet at call.
What we call Monopoly is Business at the end of its journey. The
concentration of wealth, the wiping out of the middle classes, are
other names for it. To get it is, in the world of affairs, the chief
end of man.
There are no solitary truths, Goethe says, and monopoly--as the
greatest business fact of our civilization, which gives to business
what other ages gave to war and religion--is our greatest social,
political, and moral fact.
The men and women who do the work of the world have the right to the
floor. Everywhere they are rising to "a point of information." They
want to know how our labor and the gifts of nature are being ordered
by those whom our ideals and consent have made Captains of Industry
over us; how it is that we, who profess the religion of the Golden Rule
and the political economy of service for service, come to divide our
produce into incalculable power and pleasure for a few, and partial
existence for the many who are the fountains of these powers and
pleasures. This book is an attempt to help the people answer these
questions. It has been quarried out of official records, and it is a
venture in realism in the world of realities. Decisions of courts and
of special tribunals like the Interstate Commerce Commission, verdicts
of juries in civil and criminal cases, reports of committees of the
State Legislatures and of Congress, oath-sworn testimony given in legal
proceedings and in official inquiries, corrected by rebutting testimony
and by cross-examination--such are the sources of information.
One important exception is in the description of the operations of
a great international combination in England, Germany, Holland, and
elsewhere in Europe; this has had to be made from unofficial material.
The people there are neither economically nor politically developed
to the point we have reached in America, of using the legislative
investigation and the powers of the courts to defend livelihoods and
market rights, and enforce the social responsibilities of industrial
power. Full and exact references are given throughout for the guidance
of the investigator. The language of witnesses, judges, and official
reports has been repeated verbatim, except for the avoidance of the
surplusage and reduplication usual in such literature, and that, to
permit the use of the dialogue form, the construction has been changed
from the third person to the first in quotations from evidence. With
these qualifications, wherever quotation marks have been used, the
transcription is word for word. Evidence from such sources is more
exact, circumstantial, and accurate than that upon which the mass of
historical literature is founded.
To give the full and official history of numbers of these
combinations, which are nearly identical in inspiration, method, and
result, would be repetition. Only one of them, therefore, has been
treated in full--the oil trust. It is the most successful of all the
attempts to put gifts of nature, entire industries, and world markets
under one hat. Its originators claim this precedence. It was, one of
its spokesmen says, "the parent of the trust system."[3] It is the best
illustration of a movement which is itself but an illustration of the
spirit of the age.