s 82 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the last half-century right here in the United States, in what is scarcely 

 more than the close of the first half-century of the railroad, a few 

 phenomenal brains have amassed more of these values than their share, 

 more than they can consume with their own personal wants — while 

 I admit that the problem looks serious to those whose brains have not 

 taken part in the struggle — the wrong seems to me one for which Na- 

 ture, not art or science or schools, is at present mostly responsible, just 

 as much as she is responsible for the lion that rends the ox, or the fox 

 that pillages the farm-yard. The United States of America does not 

 make treaties with individuals : and yet the treaty between the United 

 States and the kingdom of Hawaii is, or was once, practically for the 

 single benefit of one man. Why ? Because there happens to be but 

 one article of export from Hawaii to the United States ; and because 

 that one product happens, or happened, to be controlled by the brains 

 and capital of one man. So this anomaly — this wrong, we suppose Mr. 

 Hudson would call it — is to be charged to the crime of having brains, 

 or to the domination of (not railways this time, but) sugar ! Perhaps 

 the situation can be made very clear to Mr. Hudson by a quotation 

 from himself : 



He says, page 1 : " Watt could see in the steam which lifted the 

 lid from the tea-kettle a force which might yield man some aid in his 

 labors ; but he could not foresee the immense application of that force 

 to every phase of life. He could not dream of the millions of factories, 

 the thousands of steamships, or the myriads of railway-trains that lay 

 dormant in his discovery." And yet it is simply and solely because 

 a human brain here and there did foresee what Mr. Hudson says Watt 

 could not or did not — that massive fortunes, larger than an aggre- 

 gate of thousands amassed by mere manual labor and economy, have 

 been accumulated. Shall the owner of such a brain assume that Nature 

 in so endowing him endowed him with a curse to his fellow-men, and 

 that it is his natural or moral duty to devise a means of redistributing 

 this accumulation to the two hundred thousand or hundred thousand 

 millions who, like Watt, could not foresee ? I do not so understand 

 Mr. Hudson to urge ; but perhaps he will be able to demonstrate to 

 what other duty his satire on the men who, by building, buying, con- 

 trolling and operating railways, amass vast properties, surely and im- 

 placably points. 



The processes by which the fish with capital swallows the fish with- 

 out capital — by which money attracts money, and foresight eclipses 

 hindsight — stand possibly in bolder and nearer relief, just now, in the 

 case of the three or five railway kings (whose fortunes may last another 

 generation or two without division) than elsewhere. But, that they 

 are processes unfamiliar in any given commercial undertaking or vent- 

 ure, I do not find any note in Mr. Hudson's indictment to assert. His 

 indictment of railways and railway management is the constant and 

 simple and single charge that they " dominate " the non-railway world 



