44 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



powerful ownership of the telegraph lines of the United States 

 has resulted in the steady improvement of the service (the send- 

 ing of four messages at once upon a single wire and in opposite 

 directions being not the greatest of these improvements). Per- 

 haps Mr. Hudson thinks that these improvements would have 

 been more patriotically used if the inventors had employed them 

 to break down, instead of to aggrandize and strengthen, the " mo- 

 nopoly." But unless Mr. Hudson dreams of a paradise where 

 inventors seek not to be paid, are not stimulated to activity 

 by hope of reward (if, that is, he writes for his contemporaries 

 and not for an ideal republic), he must be aware of the impossi- 

 bility of legislating away the inducements to human industry or 

 the instinct of men to prefer worldly prosperity and bank ac- 

 counts to poverty and dependence. Had these inventions been 

 used to break down existing companies, the result would have 

 been finally the same. They would have been purchased by the 

 strongest purse. But the inventor would first have been ruined. 

 But Mr. Hudson, for one, still writes. Such propositions as that 

 there is not a dollar of capital in the United States which does 

 not represent somebody's labor and somebody's self-denial, or 

 that every dollar which accrues in profit to-day to the railroads 

 or other great corporate interests of this country represents from 

 two hundred to three hundred dollars paid directly, and in cash, 

 to the wage-workers (the very men for whom Mr. Hudson as- 

 sumes to speak) — such propositions, I say, do not deter him in 

 the least, nor do I anticipate that they ever will. If the corpora- 

 tions of the United States (chartered by the people of the United 

 States for transportation, manufacturing, and other purposes), 

 in endeavoring to keep abreast of the commerce and trade of the 

 people of the United States, have grown to such enormous pro- 

 portions as to attract the envy and enmity of those not holding 

 their securities, I respectfully submit that that is no reason why 

 those corporations should be punished, or their interests wrecked, 

 embarrassed, or confiscated, Mr. Hudson to the contrary notwith- 

 standing. 



The fact — the truth is, that (however it may be in other coun- 

 tries) the accumulation of wealth and centralization of com- 

 merce in great combinations has never, in the United States, 

 been a source of oppression or of poverty to the non-capitalist 

 or wage-worker. The greatest oppressors of the poor, to the con- 

 trary, are not always the largest corporations. It is quite as 

 likely, for example, to be a small Chatham Street haberdasher 

 (who himself struggles against the bottom prices of his next- 

 door "puller-in"), as a Broadway furnishing company, who pays 

 a starved seamstress three cents apiece for making shirts, and 

 holds a chattel mortgage on her sewing-machine as security 



