THE SMOKELESS REBATE
With searching intelligence, indomitable will, and a conscience which
makes religion, patriotism, and the domestic virtues but subordinate
paragraphs in a ritual of money worship, the mercantile mind flies
its air-line to business supremacy. That entirely modern social
arrangement--the private ownership of public highways--has introduced a
new weapon into business warfare which means universal dominion to him
who will use it with an iron hand.
This weapon is the rebate, smokeless, noiseless, invisible, of
extraordinary range, and the deadliest gun known to commercial warfare.
It is not a lawful weapon. Like the explosive bullet, it is not
recognized by the laws of war. It has to be used secretly. All the
rates he got were a secret between himself and the railroads. "It has
never been otherwise," testified one of the oil combination.[731] The
Chevalier Bayard declared proudly, as he lay on his death-bed, that he
had never given quarter to any one so degraded and unknightly as to
use gunpowder. Every one would close in at once to destroy a market
combatant who avowed that he employed this wicked projectile.
The apparatus of the rebate is so simple that it looks less like a
destroying angel than any weapon of offence ever known. The whole
battery consists only of a pen and ink and some paper. The discharge is
but the making of an entry--but the signing of a check. But when the
man who commands this simple enginery directs it against a business
competitor you can follow the track of wreckage like the path of a
cyclone, by the ruins which lie bleaching in the air for years. The
gentlemen who employ it give no evidence of being otherwise engaged
than in their ordinary pursuits. They go about sedate and smiling, with
seemingly friendly hands empty of all tools of death. But all about
them as they will, as if it were only by wish of theirs which attendant
spirits hastened to execute, rivals are blown out of the highways, busy
mills and refineries turn to dust, hearts break, and strong men go mad
or commit suicide or surrender their persons and their property to the
skilful artillerists.
"And in the actual practice of daily life," says Ruskin, "you will find
that wherever there is secrecy, there is either guilt or danger." "When
did you discover the fact that these rebates had been paid?" one of the
victims was asked.
"We never discovered it as a fact until the testimony was taken in
1879.... We always suspected it; but we never knew of it of our
personal knowledge, and never would really have known it of our
personal knowledge.... I had no idea of the iniquity that was going
on."[732]
Nothing so demolishing was ever so delicate and intangible as this, for
its essence is but a union of the minds of a railroad official and some
business friend, perhaps a silent partner, bent on business empire. The
model merchant, fortunate in having a friend willing so to use a power
sovereigns would not dare to use, walks the public way, strong in his
secret, and smiles with triumph as all at whom he levels his invisible
wand sicken and disappear. "He has the receipt of fern-seed. He walks
invisible."
Men who hunt their fellow-men with this concealed weapon always deny
it, as they must. To use it has always been a sin, and has been made a
crime in every civilized State. Under United States law it is, since
1887, an offence punishable with imprisonment in the penitentiary.[733]
Moral ideals are not born in legislatures. When an act attains by a
law the distinction of being made a crime, it is already well on its
way to extinction. It is made infamous by law, because it has already
become infamous before the conscience and honor of men. It was not the
prohibition of highway privilege by the Constitution of Pennsylvania or
the laws of the United States which made the rebate an iniquity. This
legal volley is but a salute to the established conscience.
The question most often pressed before all the many legislative and
judicial inquests held upon the dead bodies which strew every field of
the oil industry has been whether the extraordinary powers which the
invention of the locomotive and the transformation of public highways
into private property had given railways over the livelihoods of the
people had been used to make it impossible for any but a preferred few
to live.
One of the successful men disposed of the evidence that these powers
had been so used by styling it before the committee of Congress of
1888 as the "worst balderdash," and before the New York Legislative
Committee of 1888 as "irresponsible newspaper statements," "a malignity
and mendacity that is little short of devilishness." The secretary of
the oil trust waved it away as "all this newspaper talk and flurry."
The president knows nothing about the existence of such privileges,
except that he has "heard much of it in the papers." And yet another of
the trust in the _North American Review_ of February, 1883, similarly
describes the accusation as "uncontradicted calumny," to which, he
regrets to say, "several respectable journals and magazines lent
themselves."
After taking 3700 pages of evidence and sitting for months, the
committee of 1879 of the New York Legislature said in their report:
"The history of this corporation is a unique illustration of the
possible outgrowth of the present system of railroad management in
giving preferential rates, and also showing the colossal proportions to
which monopoly can grow under the laws of this country.[734] ... The
parties whom they have driven to the wall have had ample capital and
equal ability in the prosecution of their business in all things save
their ability to acquire facilities for transportation."[735]
The committee of the Ohio Legislature which took the evidence of the
treatment of the Marietta independents by the railroads[736] is, so far
as the author knows, the only body of all the legislative and judicial
tribunals that have been investigating for the past thirty years which
has found the relations of the railroads and the oil combination to
be proper. It used the words "public," "uniform," "in accordance
with law," "equitable," "no special discriminations or privileges"
to describe the conduct of the common carriers in that case. But in
doing so it had to except from these exculpations the railroad which
originated the attack on the independent refiners, and the rates of
which controlled the others, as it was the initial road. It had also
to admit that the oil combination had received "better rates," but
defended them on the ground that its shipments were larger. These two
exceptions are doors wide enough to admit every possibility of the
rebate. The Secretary of State for Internal Affairs of Pennsylvania
made an investigation in 1878 on the complaint of citizens. He reported
to the Attorney-General that no case had been made out "beyond the
ordinary province of individual redress." He was hung in effigy by
the citizens, and the evidence he took remains, like that of the Ohio
Committee of 1879, a valuable repository of facts from which students
can draw their own conclusions.
More than any others the wrongs of the oil industry provoked the
investigations by Congress from 1872 to 1887, and caused the
establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and more than
any others they have claimed the attention of the new law and the
new court. The cases brought before it cover the oil business on
practically every road of any importance in the United States--in
New England, the Middle States, the West, the South, the Pacific
coast; on the great East and West trunk roads--the Pennsylvania, the
Erie, the Baltimore and Ohio, the New York Central, and all their
allied lines; on the transcontinental lines--the Union Pacific,
the Central Pacific, the Southern Pacific; on the steamship and
railroad association controlling the South and Southwest. They show
that from ocean to ocean, and from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the
Gulf of Mexico, wherever the American citizen seeks an opening in
this industry, he finds it, like the deer forests and grouse moors
of the old country, protected by game-keepers against him and the
common herd. The terms in which the commission have described the
preferences given the oil combination are not ambiguous: "Great
difference in rates," "unjust discrimination," "intentional disregard
of rights," "unexcused," "a vast discrepancy," "enormous," "illegal,"
"excessive,"[737] "extraordinary," "forbidden by the act to regulate
commerce,"[738] "so obvious and palpable a discrimination that no
discussion of it is necessary," "wholly indefensible," "patent and
provoking discriminations for which no rational excuse is suggested,"
"obnoxious," "disparity ... absurd and inexcusable," "gross
disproportions and inequalities,"[739] "long practised," "the most
unjust and injurious discrimination ... and this discrimination inured
mostly to the benefit of one powerful combination."[740]
This was what the Interstate Commerce Commission found all along the
record from 1887 to 1893. When one of those who got the benefits so
characterized was before the New York Legislature in 1888, he said:
"I know of no discrimination in the oil traffic of any kind since the
passage of the Interstate Commerce Act."
"Do you use any means for the purpose of avoiding the effect of that
new law?"
"None whatever."[741]
But the people have found that the explicit prohibitions of the
Interstate Commerce law were of no more protection to them than
the equally explicit prohibitions given long before by the State
constitutions and laws, the common law of the court, and by the still
older common law of right, which the statute was created to enforce.
The "unjust," "enormous," "illegal" differences in freights by which
the public was excluded were got from the railroads after, as before,
Congress, obedient to an aroused and universal demand, had passed a
special statute and created a special tribunal to prevent and punish
this special sort of crime. This is the adjudicated fact.
This "uncontradicted calumny," "worst balderdash," "malignity
and mendacity," "irresponsible newspaper statements" proves upon
examination to be:
1. Testimony of unimpeached and in many cases uncontradicted witnesses,
given under oath in legislative investigations and in court, subject to
examination and cross-examination and rebuttal.
2. Reports of State legislative committees.
3. Copies of the contracts.[742]
4. Decision of courts, State and national.[743]
The South Improvement plan of 1872 is still in unrelenting operation,
according to the latest news. A case is now pending before the
Interstate Commerce Commission,[744] in which charges of highway abuse
even more sensational than any of those we have seen judicially proved
are made against the thirty railroads by which the oil of Ohio,
Pennsylvania, and New York reaches the Pacific coast. A San Francisco
oil dealer is the petitioner for relief. He recites the discriminations
given the oil combination on the Pacific coast before the Interstate
Commerce law was enacted. These were admitted by the officials of
the roads before the United States Pacific Railway Commission of
1887. The traffic managers of the Southern Pacific testified that
the oil combination, "from the time it acquired the oil business on
this coast, had lower rates than the general tariff provided, or than
other shippers paid on coal oil."[745] The general freight agent of
the Central Pacific Railroad admitted that his road had the same
arrangement, and had accepted the business "at rates dictated" by the
oil combination.[746] The general traffic manager of the Union Pacific
Railroad said:
"We have paid them a good deal in rebates." It was a "pretty large"
preference.
"What was the effect on the small dealer?"
"I should think it would be embarrassing to the small shipper!"[747]
When the Interstate Commerce law went into force the oil combination
introduced a patented car for the transcontinental trade, which
it claimed the sole right to use. Though the new car was to the
disadvantage of the railroads, as it cost more to haul, the managers
gave it lower rates than any other car and carried it back free, while
they punished the shippers who gave them a lighter and better car by
charging them $105 for carrying that back.
The San Francisco complainant goes on to charge that a plan was
concocted and put in operation by which rates were lowered whenever the
combination wanted to fill its warehouses on the Pacific coast, and as
soon as they were full were put back again. This lowering and raising
of rates was "to the public sudden and unexpected."[748] It was known
in advance only to the ring and the railroads. Before other shippers
could take advantage of the low rates they would be raised again. The
complaint recites that in pursuance of this plan, after the combination
had transferred to the Pacific coast at the end of 1888 from its
Eastern refineries all it needed for the next season's business, the
railroads advanced the rates from 82-1/2 cents a hundred pounds to
$1.25. The next May the railroads made a similar seesaw, and, he says,
in December, 1892, "are still making ... such arbitrary and sudden
reductions ... to the undue advantage" of the oil combination "and to
the detriment and injury of all other shippers." The San Francisco
merchant also charges that in the interest of the Eastern refineries
of the combination rates are made to prevent the large product of the
oil-fields and independent refineries of Colorado and Wyoming from
reaching the Pacific coast, "which needs them to furnish fuel for its
manufactories, as well as for light for its residents." Similarly we
find the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad charging $105 for a car-load
of cattle from Wyoming to Chicago, while for a car of 75 barrels of
oil the freight would be $348. In connection with these charges the
press published the telegrams, filling columns, which were said to have
passed between the officials of the railroads and the oil combination
in the negotiation of this arrangement. In one of these telegrams the
freight agent of the Southern Pacific explains the new deal. "He" (the
agent of the oil combination) "would stock up at the low rate, then
notify the association of railroads when to advance." The advance or
decline was to be "made at certain seasons of the year in accordance
with this supply on hand." When the negotiation was finished and the
plan was agreed to, a San Francisco agent of the oil combination is
said to have telegraphed to its officers in New York: "I think we have
managed this freight business pretty well from this long distance,
especially when you think that we have secured the 90-cent rate with
which to stock up from time to time." His telegram also discloses
that the arrangement extended to lead and linseed-oil, showing, what
is well known, that the combinations in these articles belong to the
members of that in oil. These charges are, it is to be remembered,
still unadjudicated, this published evidence is not yet substantiated.
But the arrangement which is charged is in exact pursuance of that
part of the South Improvement Company contract which bound the
railroads to "lower or raise the gross rates of transportation ...
for such times and to such extent as may be necessary to overcome
... competition."[749] And Attorney-General Olney has been publicly
informed[750] that during the summer of 1894 oil rates between
Pennsylvania and Colorado were put down from 75 cents a hundred to 25
cents, and a few weeks later raised again to the old rate. Another
increase made the rates to Denver higher, for oil, than to the Pacific
coast. He has been asked to ascertain, judicially, if this shuffling
of rates was not made, like that complained of before the Interstate
Commerce Commission, to allow the oil trust "to stock up at the old
rate." His informants suggest that the same powers with which he has
brought railway employés to trial for infractions of the Interstate
Commerce law can be used against the railways.
This is not all of the story. This patented car spoken of was a mere
aggregation of old elements, as the courts held, and the patent was
void. Advised by their lawyer that this would be the view the courts
would have to take, competitors of the combination in the business of
the Pacific coast, where they had been at the head until these new
tricks of trade came in, introduced a car of their own of the same
class. They thus became entitled to the same low rates and the same
free return of the car as their powerful rival. This put them again
on an equality in transportation. They had not been using these new
cars long before two of them, shipped as usual from the East, failed
to arrive. Their search for the missing cars put them in possession of
the interesting information that a litigation, of which they had had
no notice or knowledge whatever, had for some time been in progress,
and was at that moment at the point of decision. As their interests
had been entirely unrepresented, this decision would certainly have
been against them, and would have forever made impossible the use of
their cars on any railroad of the United States. This had been done
by an apparently hostile litigation by the oil combination against
the Southern Pacific Railroad. The former sued in the United States
courts for an injunction to forbid the railroad from hauling the
cars of the competitor, on the ground that they were an infringement
on its own patented cars. No notice was given the persons most
interested--the owners of the cars in question--whose business life
was involved, and they were not at first made parties to the suit.
The dummy defendant--the railroad--made no valid opposition, but with
great condescension admitted that all the averments of its antagonist
were true. The case was sent through the courts on a gallop to get
a decision. After that the merchants whose cars were the object of
the attack, as they had not been parties to the case, could not have
it reopened, and it would stand against them without possibility of
reversal. The firm found that a temporary injunction had been applied
for and had been granted; that this had been followed by proceedings to
make the injunction perpetual; that subpoenas had been issued, served,
and returned, and an order had been obtained from the court for taking
testimony. In place of the regular examiner of the court, a special
examiner had been appointed; he had begun taking evidence the same
day, and taking it privately. The testimony so taken had been sealed
and filed. The railroad had made its answer December 2d, the testimony
already taken was filed in court December 3d, making the case complete
for decision by the judges. December 4th the firm heard for the first
time of what was being done, and December 5th applied for the right to
take part, which saved them. To get such cases ready for a hearing in
the United States Circuit Court, where this was done, usually requires
a year. But in this instance it was done in two weeks! Only just as
the door of the court was closing irrevocably, as far as their rights
were concerned, did the firm get inside, and secure leave to have
their side represented. The whole fabric of the litigation fell at the
first touch. The temporary injunction against the use of their car was
dissolved, the permanent injunction was refused, the patent of the oil
trust's car was declared worthless, and this decision was upheld by the
United States Circuit Court of Appeals in February, 1893.[751]
Meanwhile their oil, side-tracked in the Mojave Desert and elsewhere,
was being cooked to death, their customers were going elsewhere, and
they were being put to loss and damages which they are now suing to
have made good to them. "There are some equivocal circumstances in
the case," said Judge Hoffman, dissolving the injunctions in 1890. He
pointed out that the railroad made no objection to the injunction which
deprived it of business. This "tends to corroborate suspicions," he
said, suggested by other features of the case. The railroad persisted
in remaining in the case to the end, after the real parties in interest
came in, and, although codefendants with these parties, the road
manoeuvred for the benefit of the other side in a way which the Court
again said "had an equivocal appearance." The counsel for the firm,
in his brief for the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, pointed
out more causes for "suspicion." He showed the Court that the records
of the case had been mutilated in many places. All the mutilations
were in favor of the other side of the case. Who was the author of
the mutilations was not shown, but it was shown that the record had
been intrusted by the lower court to a representative of one of the
oil trust, to be printed and delivered to the Court of Appeals. "It
would be a very easy matter for a vicious attorney," said the lawyer
of the independents, "under such circumstances, to make changes
and alterations in the record that might not be noticed, but would
nevertheless greatly prejudice the case."
When the victims of the smokeless rebate used the only property many
of them had left--their right of appeal to courts or Legislature
or executive officials--they were showered with abuse, as people
with "private grievances,"[752] "strikers and sore-heads,"
"black-mailers,"[753] "moss-backs," ... "naturally left in the lurch"
... "people who came forward with envy and jealousy of the success"
of the oil combination,[754] "throttlers," "ravenous wolves," "hoary
old reprobate," "senile old liar," "public till-tapper," "plunderers,"
"pestilence."[755] Such are a few of the blossoms of rhetoric
with which those who sought their rights in courts or before the
Legislature have been crowned. These witnesses have come forward all
through the period between 1872 and 1892, and from every point of
importance in the industry--New York, Pittsburg, Cleveland, Oil City,
San Francisco, Titusville, Philadelphia, Marietta, Buffalo, Boston,
Cincinnati, Louisville, Memphis, New Orleans. They have come from every
province of the industry--the refineries, the oil fields, the pipe
lines, railroads, the wholesale and retail markets. Bound together
by no common tie of organization or partnership, they have, each and
all, exactly the same kind of story to tell. The substance of their
complaint--that one selected knot of men, members of one organization,
were given, unlawfully, the control of the highways, to the exclusion
and ruin of the people--has been sustained by the evidence taken by
every official investigation, and by the decision of every court to
which the facts have been submitted.
As the counsel of the New York Chamber of Commerce before the New York
Legislative Committee of 1879 said: "Such a power makes it possible to
the freight agents of the railways to constitute themselves special
partners in every line of business in the United States, contributing
as their share of capital to the business the ability to crush out
rivals." Men who can choose which merchants, manufacturers, producers
shall go to market and which stay at home, have a key that will unlock
the door of every business house on the line; they know the combination
of every safe.
In their appeal to the executive of Pennsylvania, the Petroleum
Producers' Union refer to the conduct of the railroad officials as
"inexplicable upon any ordinary hypothesis, or under any known theory
of railroad politics."[756] What the railroad managers did, we know;
why they did it, has never been judicially demonstrated. One of the
earliest intimations of the kind of lubricant used was given by the
anti-monopoly leader of the people in the Constitutional Convention
of Pennsylvania of 1872, who is now the legal leader of the oil
combination. He said: "I am told that discriminations are now made to
so great an extent as to be ruinous to certain companies unless the
railroad companies' officers are given a bonus. That is the evil under
which we labor. I do not know how to cure it, but it must be cured
somehow." Again he said: "It is charged--I do not make the charge
myself--but it is charged upon a railroad company running through the
oil regions that it will not, without delay, transport oil delivered to
the railroad station by the various pipe lines unless it is interested
in the pipe line.... It is said that whenever a new pipe line is
built, it is necessary that somebody connected with the particular
railroad company shall be presented with stock in the pipe line;
otherwise, it (the railroad company) will not furnish cars without
tedious and unnecessary delay. This is a discrimination which should be
stopped."[757]
It is plain that the purpose of the discrimination was something
more than to shunt the control of the trade--more than "to maintain
the business" of the favorite. Ten cents a barrel difference would
have done that, for, as the Supreme Court of Ohio pointed out, that
alone amounted to a tax of 21 per cent. a year on the capital of the
"outsiders."[758] When 10 cents was enough, why was the tax made
22-1/2 cents, 25 cents, 64-1/2 cents up to $1.10?
Some railroad men are known to have been stockholders in the oil
combination. "I think I owned--I guess I had $100,000 in it.... I don't
know anything at all about it"--the company--the head of the New York
Central admitted.[759] Who were the owners of certain shares of their
capital stock these men have always refused to divulge. In giving in
court a list of stockholders of one of their corporations one of the
officers uncovered only three-quarters of the stock. Who held the other
fourth he avowed he could not say, although the stock-book was in his
custody.[760] The dividends were paid to the vice-president, and by
him handed over to these veiled prophets. There was a similar mystery
about the owners of about $2,000,000 of the National Transit stock, the
concern which owns and manages the pipe lines. Asked for the names of
the owners of this portion, the "secretary" said:
"It is a private matter.... I decline to answer."[761]
The president of this pipe-line branch also refused to give Congress
this information.[762] This secrecy will couple itself at once in the
mind of the investigator with the charges just quoted, that railroad
officials had to be given backsheesh of pipe-line stock before their
roads would carry the oil of the pipe lines.
The United States Senate Committee which investigated the cattle and
meat monopolies had a similar experience. Their report says: "The
secretary of the Union Stockyards testified at Chicago that when the
company was established the stock was subscribed by the railroads; but
when asked to show his stock-books he declined, after consultation with
the company's attorneys, and persisted in this refusal at Washington
City. For the purposes of our investigation it was not considered
necessary to ascertain in whose names the stock now stands, for we
were satisfied that whatever the ownership it would not appear in the
names of the railroad presidents, directors, and stockholders, who
are the real owners.... The refusal of the secretary, under direction
of his employers, to make public the list of stockholders must have
been because of the fact that the same men own the stockyards and the
railroads running to them, and they do not propose to submit their
books to scrutiny because they dread the truth.... This extraordinary
conduct on the part of the stockyards company is not alone in the chain
of evidence which shows complicity between the stockyards and the
railroads."[763]
The smokeless rebate makes the secret of success in business to
be not manufacture, but manufracture--breaking down with a strong
hand the true makers of things. To those who can get the rebate it
makes no difference who does the digging, building, mining, making,
producing the million forms of the wealth they covet for themselves.
They need only get control of the roads. All that they want of the
wealth of others can be switched off the highways into their hands.
To succeed, ambitious men must make themselves refiners of freight
rates, distillers of discriminations, owners, not of lands, mines, and
forests--not in the first place, at least--but of the railway officials
through whose hands the produce must go to market; builders, not of
manufactories, but of privileges; inventors only of schemes to keep for
themselves the middle of the road and both sides of it; contrivers, not
of competition, but of ways to tax the property of their competitors
into their pockets. They need not make money; they can take it from
those who have made it.
In the United States the processes of business feudalization are moving
more rapidly to the end than in any other country. In Chicago, the
youngest of the great cities of the youngest of the great nations,
there are fewer wholesale dry-goods stores in 1894 for a population of
1,600,000 than there were in 1860 for 112,172. In almost every one of
the meteoric careers by which a few men in each trade are rising to
supreme wealth, it will generally be found that to some privilege on
the railed highways, accomplished by the rebate, is due the part of
their rise which is extraordinary. A few cases of great wealth from
the increased value of land, a few from remarkable inventions like the
sewing-machine, are only exceptions.
From using railroad power to give better rates to the larger man, it
was an easy step to using it to make a favorite first a larger man,
then the largest man, and finally the only man in the business. In
meat and cattle we see men rising from poverty to great wealth. From
being competitors, like other men, in the scramble, they get into the
comfortable seat of control of the prices at which the farmer must sell
cattle, and at which the people must buy meat.[764] Many other men
had thrift, sobriety, industry, but only these had the rebate, and so
only these are the "fittest in the struggle for existence." We find a
merchant prince of the last generation in New York gathering into his
hands a share of the dry-goods business of the country which appears
entirely disproportionate to his ability and energy, great though these
be. Is his secret a brain so much larger than his competitors' brains
as his business is greater than theirs? The freight agent of the New
York Central testified that he gave this man a special rate "to build
up and develop their business."
"They were languishing and suffering?"
"To a great extent."[765]
"This," said the counsel for the Chamber of Commerce of New York before
the committee, "is deliberately making the rich richer and the poor
poorer, by taxing the poor for the benefit of the rich through the
instrumentality of the freight charge."[766]
The officials of the Pennsylvania Railroad, by the use of rebates,
handed over the State of Pennsylvania to three coal-dealers, each of
whom had his territory, and was supreme in it, as would-be competitors
found out when they undertook to ship coal into his market. They made
a similar division of the iron and steel business. The rebate is the
golden-rule of the "gospel of wealth." We have already seen that the
secret of the few corporations which have become the owners of almost
every acre of the anthracite coal of Pennsylvania was the rebate.[767]
Along one of the most important lines out of Chicago grain dealers who
had been buying and selling in an open market, building elevators,
investing capital and life, found five years ago market and railroad
and livelihood suddenly closed to them, and the work of thirty years
brought to an untimely end. The United States Interstate Commerce
Commission, and the United States District Attorneys co-operating with
it, broke down in the attempt to compel the railroad men who gave these
privileges of transportation, or the business men who received them,
to testify or to produce their books. The United States grand-jury in
Chicago, in December, 1890, proceeded against the shippers and the
railroad men. All of them refused to tell the rates given or received,
or to produce their books.
Why do you refuse to answer? they were asked.
Because to do so would incriminate us.
Here, too, would-be successful men have gone gunning with the smokeless
rebate for control of the wheat and corn and all the produce of the
American farmer. Grain is fated to go the way that oil, hard coal,
cattle, and meat have already gone. The farmer may remain the nominal
owner of his farm under these circumstances, but he will be real owner
of nothing but the piece of paper title.
First the product of the farm; then the farm. In America rises the
shadow of a coming land-ownership more concentrated, more cruel, with
the impersonal cruelty of corporate anonymity, than any the world has
yet seen.
The grain broker who becomes, by favor of the general freight agent,
the sole shipper and warehouseman of grain along a line of railroad,
becomes thereby the sole buyer, and in the sole buyer of the produce we
have the fast-growing germ of the future sole buyer of the land.
"Petroleum is the victim to-day," said the address, in 1872, of the
Petroleum Producers' Union "to all newspapers and boards of trade
opposing monopoly.... Coal, iron, cotton, breadstuffs, or live-stock
may be in the grasp of the monopoly to-morrow." The prediction is more
than half fulfilled.
"I ran away from home, and went to California," said a prominent grain
merchant to the writer, "to escape being compelled to testify as to
the freight rates I was paying. But these decisions that we cannot be
forced to incriminate ourselves give me safe-conduct, and I am going
home to take all the rebates I can get."
This is what is going on to-day in the "division of property" in
America. Our society is woven together by the steam shuttle that
moves between its farms and dinner-tables, its cotton-fields and
factories, thousands of miles apart, and the shuttle is crooked.
Out of $800,000,000 paid yearly in this country for the carriage of
freight, it was estimated in 1888, by one who knew, that $50,000,000
to $100,000,000 goes to favored shippers.[768] As the result of
personal examination made as an expert for stockholders, he declared
that one of the great trunk lines had in the last twenty years thus
diverted to favorites of the managers $100,000,000 of the money of
the stockholders. Besides his yachts and trotters, every Captain of
Industry worth talking about keeps his stud of railway presidents and
general freight agents.
Public opinion, as yet only in the gristle in these new questions,
turns upon first one and then another as the author of its
troubles--the soulless corporation, the combination of corporations,
railroad oppression, or what not. But the corporation is merely a
cover, the combination of corporations an advantage, the private
ownership of public highways an opportunity, and the rebate its perfect
tool. The real actors are men; the real instrument, the control of
their fellows by wealth, and the mainspring of the evil is the morals
and economics which cipher that brothers produce wealth when they are
only cheating each other out of birthrights.
The success of the same men in Europe shows that railroad
discrimination is not the essence of their power, though it has
in America been the chief instrument. By their wealth and their
willingness to use it in their way they have become supreme. Supreme
even where, as in England and Germany, they had no such unjust and
crushing preference on the highways as in America. Back of highway
privilege, back of money power, back of trade supremacy gained by
these two means must be reckoned, as the essence of this phenomenon,
the morality--our morality--which not only allows but encourages men
to do each other to death, provided only the weapon be a bargain and
the arena a market. "Everything shall not go to market," says Emerson;
but everything does go to market. The millionaire is the modern hero,
says the New York _Evening Post_. The men who have found in the rebate
the secret of business success--and there are more of them than the
public guesses--have only extended a fiercer hand to the results all
were aiming at. They have used the smokeless rebate because it was the
best gun. But if that had not been ready to their hand, they would have
taken the next best. The course of conquest might have been slower,
but, unless checked by moral interventions, it would have reached the
same end. If society is founded on the idea that property belongs to
the strongest, these will sooner or later get all the property, by
bargains or by battles according to "the spirit of the age."
The highest State and national courts and the Interstate Commerce
Commission of the United States have sustained the people in the
assertion of their rights, under the law, to come and go with free
and equal rights on the highways. The judges have solemnly warned
the guilty men that they must give up their "abhorrent" attempt to
drive citizens out of the industries of their choice, and to add the
property of the people to their vast estates. Although thus declared
in the right by the highest judges of the law and the fact, the people
are poor, defeated, and unsuccessful. Though thus warned by the
authoritative voice of the ministers of right and justice that their
purposes and practices are iniquitous and intolerable, the men who have
determined that whole provinces of American industry shall be theirs,
and theirs only, continue their warfare of extermination upon poor men
with methods practically unchanged. They evade or defy the laws of
the States and of the nation, and the decisions of the courts, State
and national. Guided by the advice of the skilfullest lawyers, they
persist in open violation, or make such changes in their procedure as
will nullify statute and decision without danger to them. For thirty
years the independents in the oil regions have had this reinforcement
of the law, and for thirty years, in spite of it, their rights have
been defiantly, continuously violated to the common ruin. The people
spend their lives passing about from field or factory, or shop or
office, to market, from market to court, from court to Legislature,
from Legislature to printing-office. They are the type of the time,
disturbed by the demand of the new tyranny of wealth for tribute from
their daily labors, and forbidden to rest until out of their suffering
a new liberty has been won--the industrial liberty, for which political
and religious liberty wait for their full realization.