336 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



disgust against property has been expressed in the democratic far 

 West, where refinement unpossessed of wealth jostles with the coarse 

 ostentation of the bonanza kings. 



The conquest of the weak by the strong, which must date from the 

 very dawn of trade as from the first morning of life, has . been more 

 remarkable than ever within the last generation or two. The new 

 methods of rapid or instantaneous communication bring vast commer- 

 cial fields under the scrutiny of the keenest business intellects, and the 

 local knowledge of the small trader is overborne in competition by the 

 capital, adroitness, or unscrupulousness of his metropolitan adversary. 

 Modern business economy favors vast organizations which absorb fee- 

 ble competitors, and convert men who were independent principals into 

 the servants of a master-will, whether controlling an individual firm 

 or a corporation. 



The danger to the public interest in the growth of great monopo- 

 lizing companies is proved in the case of the Western Union Telegraph 

 Company, which had nominally a capital of eighty million dollars a 

 year ago, upon which it had to pay dividends. Nearly fifty-five of the 

 eighty millions was, however, fictitious stock water, in the language of 

 Wall Street (see " North American Review," March, 1881). In the 

 " Atlantic Monthly " for March, 1881, it is stated that the Standard Oil 

 Company refines nineteen twentieths of the coal-oil of the United 

 States, and robs the public of eight and three quarter cents per gallon 

 by its monopolizing control. And what makes the abuses of property 

 so difficult of legislative reform is that monopolists in their schemes 

 avail themselves of business rules which, in their ordinary working, 

 are legitimate, and can not be safely interfered with. If a Legislature 

 enacts that a company shall not divide more than ten per cent annu- 

 ally as profit, that company is sold out to another, and both of them 

 can pay dividends up to ten per cent. Competition is abolished by 

 exercise of the right of purchase and sale, whereby competing railway, 

 steamboat, or telegraph lines may be controlled by a single capitalist 

 or syndicate ; the operation being aided by banking facilities whereby 

 stocks can be pledged as collateral security for loans equal to eighty 

 or ninety per cent of their market value. The presidents and di- 

 rectors of great companies who organize such operations, and who 

 have at all times special and early information of the influences likely 

 to affect the value of their stocks, either directly or through agents, 

 and the margin system, frequently add large sums to their fortunes at 

 the expense of ignorant shareholders. The ordinary operator in Wall 

 Street loses simply because he plays against men whose dice are loaded. 

 The tendency to corporate and wholesale management so plain in the 

 vast enterprises of the country is manifest in the less noticeable. In 

 the Western States the factory-system has invaded the corn-fields : 

 grand culture, as it is called, has come into vogue ; large capital, elab- 

 orate steam-machinery, and regiments of laborers, are cultivating the 



