580 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



or San Francisco, or any city or town large enough to make a dot on 

 the map, or any one of the ten thousand points reachable from every 

 one of these, there are certainly half a dozen lines of railway at his 

 option ; and if there are two points in the United States between 

 which there is but one means of transportation, it is because the 

 points themselves are of such exceedingly minor importance that a 

 second means has entirely failed to be a temptation to local capitalists. 

 I once happened upon a railroad on the top of the Alleghany Mount- 

 ains, five miles in length, called the Wilcox and Burning-Well Rail- 

 road, running between a tannery and a saw-mill, which — as there was 

 no other means of going from one to the other except by taking an 

 axe and a compass and tempting the aboriginal forest — might, I think, 

 be fairly called a monopoly, especially since the owner of the railroad 

 was also the owner of both the terminal tannery and the terminal saw- 

 mill. But the great majority of American railways are, just now, 

 competitors rather than monopolists, and, if gigantic at all, are gigan- 

 tic competitors. It is to be admitted, of course, that to construct, 

 maintain, and operate a " gigantic " railway, gigantic corporations 

 may not be unnecessary. 



Now , railways " dominate," says Mr. Hudson, by being these gi- 

 gantic corporations against which units have no chance. But just as 

 capital is the storage of labor, so a corporation is the aggregate of 

 units, and if units can combine to " dominate " other and uncombined 

 units, why can not these other units combine to resist the domina- 

 tion ? Mr. Hudson does not recognize such a question, suggests no 

 device by which the unit unassisted by capital can equal in strength 

 the unit when so assisted, nor any reason why the units incorporated 

 for transportation purposes should not compete for the transportation 

 business of the units not incorporated for transportation purposes. 

 This word "competition," however, is no favorite of Mr. Hudson's. 

 He immensely prefers " domination " : and properly so, too, since in 

 the employment of the latter word lie not only his premises, but the 

 conclusions at which he assumes to arrive. The railways, concreted, 

 "dominate" the republic (that is to say, all the United States except 

 the railways), and therefore, since they " dominate " by doing the 

 transportation business of those not in that business, the only safety is 

 to reverse the situation, so that the units not incorporated for trans- 

 portation purposes should hereafter dominate the units w T ho are so in- 

 corporated. In other words : Let our railroads, by all means, be run 

 by men who do not understand railroading, and let those who do un- 

 derstand the running of railroads step down and out at once. 



But why should those individually concerned in railway manage- 

 ment step down and out ? Why, says Mr. Hudson, because sev- 

 eral of them have accumulated enormous fortunes ; fortunes fabulous, 

 even when compared with all the other private fortunes in the world. 

 But whence come these ten or a dozen (if so many) vast fortunes ? 



