CUT OFF FROM FIRE
Rome banished those who had been found to be public enemies by
forbidding every one to give them fire and water. That was done by
all to a few. In America it is done by a few to all. A small number
of men are obtaining the power to forbid any but themselves to supply
the people with fire in nearly every form known to modern life and
industry, from matches to locomotives and electricity. They control
our hard coal and much of the soft,[4] and stoves, furnaces, and steam
and hot-water heaters; the governors on steam-boilers and the boilers;
gas and gas-fixtures; natural gas and gas-pipes; electric lighting,
and all the appurtenances. You cannot free yourself by changing from
electricity to gas, or from the gas of the city to the gas of the
fields. If you fly from kerosene to candles, you are still under the
ban.
The report adopted by the National Association of Stove Manufacturers,
at the Thirteenth Annual Convention, 1884, said: "While it is true
that iron is a dollar or two lower than last year, and that the cost
of labor has also been reduced, your committee is confident that there
is not a manufacturer present who can truthfully say he can afford to
reduce the price of his goods." "It is a chronic case," the President
said in 1888, "of too many stoves, and not enough people to buy them."
The match company, by whose consent all the fires in the United States
and Canada are lighted, was organized, as stated, by the Supreme Court
of Michigan, for the purpose of controlling the manufacture and trade.
Thirty-one manufacturers, owning substantially all the factories
where matches were made in the United States, either went into the
combination, or were purchased by the match company, and out of this
number all were closed except about thirteen.
One of the company, who has been a conspicuous candidate for a
nomination to the presidency of the United States, testified that the
price of matches was kept up to pay the large sums of money expended
to exclude others from the match business, remove competition, buy up
machinery and patents, and purchase other match factories. This was
told in a suit between two stockholders on a question of their relative
rights; but the court, of its own motion, declared the combination
illegal, and took notice of the public interests involved.[5]
"Such a vast combination is a menace to the public," said the court.
"It is no answer to say that this monopoly has, in fact, reduced the
price of friction-matches. That policy may have been necessary to
crush competition. The fact exists that it rests in the discretion of
this company at any time to raise the price to an exorbitant degree."
"Indeed, it is doubtful if free government can long exist in a country
where such enormous amounts of money are allowed to be accumulated in
the vaults of corporations, to be used at discretion in controlling the
property and business of the country against the interest of the public
and that of the people, for the personal gain and aggrandizement of a
few individuals."
Within the last thirty years, 95 per cent. of the anthracite coal of
America--practically the entire supply, it was reported by Congress in
1893--has passed from the ownership of private citizens, many thousands
in number, into the possession of the railroads controlling the
highways of the coal-fields.
These railroads have been undergoing a similar process of
consolidation, and are now the property of eight great corporations.
This surrender of their property by the individual coal-mine owners is
a continuing process, in operation at this moment, for the complete
extinction of the "individual" and the independents in this field. It
is destined, according to the report of Congress of 1893,[6] to end
"in the entire absorption ... of the entire anthracite coal-fields and
collieries by ... the common carriers."
Anthracite coal is geographically a natural monopoly contained in three
contiguous fields which, if laid close together, would not cover more
than eight miles by sixty. But bituminous coal, although scattered
in exhaustless measures all over the continent, is being similarly
appropriated by the railroads, and its area is being similarly limited
artificially by their interference.
"Railroad syndicates," says the investigation of 1888,[7] "are buying
all the best bituminous coal lands along their lines in Missouri,
Kansas, Colorado, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, and other Western
States and Territories, no doubt with a view of levying tribute upon
the people's fuel and the industrial fires of the country."
Canada remains unannexed politically, but its best coal deposits
have become a part of the United States. In 1892 a syndicate of
American capitalists obtained the control of the principal bituminous
coal-mines of Nova Scotia. Among them were men connected both with the
anthracite pool and with the combination which seeks control of the oil
market of Canada and of the United States.
The process of consolidation is shown by official and judicial
investigations to have been in progress in the bituminous fields at
least as far back as 1871, with the same purposes, methods, and results
as in the anthracite fields, though more slowly, on account of the
greater number and vastness of the deposits. From Pennsylvania to the
Pacific coast these are narrowed to the territory along the railroads,
and narrowed there again to the mines owned or favored by the railroad
managers.
The investigations by Congress in 1888 and 1893 both state that the
railroads of the country are similarly becoming the owners of our iron
and timber lands, and both call upon the people to save themselves. A
new law of industry is rising into view. Ownership of the highways ends
in ownership of everything and everybody that must use the highways.
The railroads compel private owners to sell them their mines or all the
product by refusing to supply cars for their business, and by charging
rates for the transportation of coal so high that every one but
themselves loses money on every ton sent to market. When the railroads
elect to have the output large, they furnish many cars; when they elect
to have the output small, they furnish few cars; and when they elect
that there shall be no output whatever, they furnish no cars.
One of the few surviving independent coal producers, who is losing
heavily on every ton he sends to market, but keeps on in the hope that
the law will give him redress, was asked by a committee of Congress why
he did not sell out and give up the business? He was willing, he said,
to abide the time when his rights on the railroad could be judicially
determined. There was another reason. "It might be considered a very
sentimental one. I have spent, sir, considerable time and a large
amount of energy and skill in building up my business, and I rather
like to continue it."
"In other words, you don't want to be forced to sell out?"
"No, sir; I don't want to be forced to sell my product, any more than I
want to be forced to sell my collieries."[8]
Though coal is an article of commerce greater in volume than any other
natural product in the United States carried on railroads, amounting to
not less than 130,000,000 tons a year; and though the appliances for
its transportation have been improved, and the cost cheapened every
year, so that it can be handled with less cost and risk than almost any
other class of freight, the startling fact appears in the litigations
before the Interstate Commerce Commission and the investigations by
Congress, that anthracite freight rates have been advanced instead of
being decreased, are higher now than they were in 1879, and that coal
is made by these confederated railroads to pay rates vastly higher
than the average of all other high and low class freight, nearly
double the rate on wheat or cotton. These high freight rates serve
the double purpose of seeming to justify the high price of coal, and
of killing off year by year the independent coal-producers. What the
railroad coal-miner pays for freight returns to its other self, the
railroad. What the independent coal-producer pays goes also to the
railroad, his competitor. "This excess over just and reasonable rates
of transportation constitutes an available fund by which they (the
railroads) are enabled to crush out the competition of independent
coal-producers."[9]
By these means, as Congress found in 1888,[10] the railroad managers
have forced the independent miners to sell to them or their friends
at the price they chose to pay. They were the only possible buyers,
because only they were sure of a supply of cars, and of freight rates
at which they could live.
The private operators thus being frozen out are able, as the
investigation by the New York Legislature in 1878 showed, to produce
coal more economically than the great companies, because not burdened
with extravagant salaries, royalties, and leases, interest on
fictitious bonded debts, and dividends on false capitalization of
watered stock. By the laws of supply and demand they would compete out
the unwieldy corporations, but these administer a superior political
economy in their supply and demand of cars and freight rates. The
unfittest, economically, survives.
"The railroad companies engaged in mining and transporting coal
are practically in a combination to control the output and fix the
price.... They have a practical monopoly of the production, the
transportation, and sale of anthracite coal."[11] This has been the
finding in all the investigations for twenty years. "More than one, if
not all, of the anthracite monopolies," Congress reported in 1888, "run
several of their mines in the name of private operators to quiet the
general clamor against carrying companies having a monopoly of mining
also."
The anthracite collieries of Pennsylvania could now produce 50,000,000
tons a year. The railroads restrict them to 40,000,000 or 41,000,000
tons,[12] nine or ten million tons less than they could furnish to ward
off the frosts of winter and to speed the wheels of the world, and this
creation of artificial winter has been in progress from the beginning
of the combination.
In the ten months between February and November, 1892, the price of
coal in the East, as investigated by Congress in 1893,[13] was advanced
by the coal railroads as much as $1.25 and $1.35 a ton on the kinds
used by house-keepers, and the combinations, the report of Congress
says, "exercise even a more baleful influence on the production and
transportation of coal for the Western market." The extortion in the
price fixed by the coal railroads was found by Congress, in 1888, to
be an average of one dollar a ton--"considerably more than a dollar
a ton"--on all consumed in the United States, or $39,000,000 in that
year, and now $40,000,000 to $41,000,000 a year. The same investigation
found that between 1873 and 1886 $200,000,000 more than a fair market
price was taken from the public by this combination.[14]
This in anthracite alone. How many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of
millions more have been taken by the railroads which control the
bituminous coal-fields from Pennsylvania to the Pacific, there are no
adjudicated means of estimating.
By the same power which has crushed out the independent coal-miner,
the retailer in the cities has been reduced from a free man to
an instrument to despoil his neighbors--with whom he is often a
fellow-victim--for the benefit of absentee capitalists; he is hounded
by detectives; by threats of cutting off his supply, is made a
compulsory member of a secret oath-bound society to "maintain prices."
"Combinations exist," says the Canadian report, "among coal-dealers
in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and London. Detectives are employed
and the dealers placed under surveillance.... Oaths of fidelity to
the constitution and rules are required not only of the members, but
also of their salesmen, and the oaths in the cases of these employés
are made in some instances retroactive as well as prospective. All
violations of oaths are adjudicated upon by the executive committee
referred to, the penalties being heavy fines or expulsion.... In
accordance with arrangements made with the American coal-dealers, those
who were in default in membership, either from inability to pay fines
or from other causes, were prevented from purchasing coal in the United
States."[15]
The retailer dare not tell his wrongs even in the committee-rooms
of Congress. "Your committee," says the report of 1893 to Congress,
"experienced great difficulty in obtaining testimony from retail
coal-dealers, who apparently labor under fears of injury to their
business in case they should appear and give evidence."
"During the first forty years," Congress reported in 1888, "the
mines were worked by individuals, just as are farms. The hundreds of
employers were in active competition with each other for labor. The
fundamental law of supply and demand alike governed all parties. As to
engagement, employer and employé stood upon a common level of equality
and manhood. Skill and industry upon the part of the miner assured to
him steady work, fair wages, honest measurement, and humane treatment.
Should these be denied by one employer many other employers were ready
to give them. The miner had the same freedom as to engagement, the same
reward for faithful service, and protection against injustice that
the farm-hand possesses because of the competition between farmers
employing hands.... This virtual combination of all employers into one
syndicate has practically abolished competition between them as to
wages; and gradually, but inexorably, the workmen have found themselves
encoiled as by an anaconda until now they are powerless."[16]
There was an investigation of the coal combination by the Pennsylvania
Legislature in 1871, the testimony taken in which showed that when,
after a thirty days' strike by the men, a number of private coal-mine
owners acceded to their terms, and wished to reopen their mines and
send coal again to market, the railroads, by which alone they could get
to market, raised their freights, as their men were still on strike,
to three times the previous figures. These great corporations had
determined not to yield to their men, and as they were mine-owners and
coal-sellers as well as carriers, they refused to take coal for their
competitors.... The result was that the price of coal was doubled,
rising to $12 a ton; the resumption by the private mine-owners was
stopped; and they, the workmen, and the consumer were all delivered
over to the tender mercies of the six great companies.[17]
The coal companies in the anthracite regions keep thousands of
surplus laborers on hand to underbid each other for employment and
for submission to all exactions; hold them purposely ignorant when
the mines are to be worked and when closed, so that they cannot
seek employment elsewhere; bind them as tenants by compulsion in the
companies' houses, so that rent shall run against them, whether wages
run on or not, and under leases by which they can be turned out with
their wives and children on the mountain-side in midwinter if they
strike; compel them to fill cars of larger capacity than agreed upon;
make them buy their powder and other working outfit of the companies at
an enormous advance on the cost; compel them to buy coal of the company
at the company's price, and in many cases to buy a fixed quantity,
more than they need; compel them to employ the doctor named by the
company, and to pay him whether sick or well; "pluck" them at the
company's stores, so that when pay-day comes around the company owes
the men nothing, there being authentic cases where "sober, hard-working
miners toiled for years or even a lifetime without having been able to
draw a single dollar, or but a few dollars, in actual cash," in "debt
until the day they died;" refuse to fix the wages in advance, but pay
them upon some hocus-pocus sliding scale, varying with the selling
price in New York, which the railroad slides to suit itself; and, most
extraordinary of all, refuse to let the miners know the prices on which
their living slides--a fraud, says the report of Congress, "on its
face."[18]
The companies dock the miners' output arbitrarily for slate and other
impurities, and so can take from their men five to fifty tons more in
every hundred than they pay for.[19]
In order to keep the miners disciplined and the coal-market
under-supplied, the railroads restrict work so that the miners often
have to live for a month on what they can earn in six or eight days;
and these restrictions are enforced upon their miners by withholding
cars from them to fill, as upon competitors by withholding cars to go
to market.[20]
Labor organizations are forbidden, and the men intentionally provoked
to strike, to affect the coal-market.
The laboring population of the coal regions, finally, is kept
"down" by special policemen enrolled under special laws, and often
in violation of law, by the railroads and coal and iron companies
practically when and in what numbers these companies choose. These
coal and iron policemen are practically without responsibility to any
one but their employers, are armed as the corporations see fit with
army revolvers, or Winchester rifles, or both, are made detectives
by statute, and not required to wear their shields. They provoke the
people to riot, and then shoot them legally.[21]
"By the percentage of wages," says the report of Congress, "by false
measurements, by rents, stores, and other methods, the workman is
virtually a chattel of the operator." It says, to summarize: "The
carrier drives out both operator and owner, obtains the property, works
the mine, 'disciplines' the miner, lowers wages by the importation of
Huns and Italians, restricts the output, and advances the price of coal
to the public. It is enabled to commit such wrongs upon individuals
and the public by virtue of exercising absolute control of a public
highway."[22]
The people of Pennsylvania, in 1873, adopted a new Constitution. To
put an end to the consolidation of all the anthracite coal lands into
the hands of the railroads, this Constitution forbade common carriers
to mine or manufacture articles for transportation over their lines,
or to buy land except for carrying purposes. These provisions of the
Constitution have been disobeyed "defiantly." "The railroads have
defiantly gone on acquiring title to hundreds of thousands of acres of
coal, as well as of neighboring agricultural lands." They have been
"aggressively pursuing the joint business of carrying and mining coal."
So far from quitting it, they "have increased their mining operations
by extracting bituminous as well as anthracite."[23]
Instead of enacting "appropriate legislation," as commanded by the
new Constitution, to effectuate its prohibitions, the Legislature has
passed laws to nullify the Constitution by preventing forever any
escheat to the State of the immense area of lands unlawfully held by
the railroads. Every effort breaking down to meet the evil by State
action, failure was finally confessed by the passage in 1878, by the
Pennsylvania Legislature, of a joint resolution asking Congress to
legislate "for equity in the rates of freight."
In 1887 Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Law, and established
the Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce justice on the railway
highways. The independent mine-owners of Pennsylvania appealed to
it. Two years and a half were consumed in the proceedings. The
Commission decided that the rates the railroad charged were unjust
and unreasonable, and ordered them reduced.[24] But the decision has
remained unenforced, and cannot be enforced. The railroads treat the
Commission with the same contumely they visit on the Constitution of
Pennsylvania, and two years after the decision Congress in 1893 found
their rates to be 50 cents a ton higher than what the Commission had
declared to be just and equitable.[25] The Interstate Commerce Law
provides for the imprisonment in the penitentiary of those guilty of
the crimes it covers. But the only conviction had under it has been of
a shipper for discriminating against a railroad.