ARE RAILROADS PUBLIC ENEMIES? 583 



by making the rich richer and the poor poorer ; and this, principally, 

 by piling up vast accumulations of wealth in the hands of the very 

 few. Mr. Hudson is wary enough to see that railroads, not being per 

 se illegal, the accident and consequence are not illegal ; he, therefore, 

 argues deftly that the railways, although legal, are illegally handled 

 by their managers. This illegality he separates into five counts — that 

 the transportation business, legitimate in itself, has been made per- 

 nicious to public and private rights, and " dominates " them by certain 

 imported incidents, viz., by — 

 I. Land-grants. 

 II. Pools. 



III. Construction companies. 



IV. Rebates and discriminations. 

 V. " Fast-freight lines." 



Mr. Hudson does not add to these — sleeping, hotel, and parlor-car 

 companies, railway-lighting companies, and all the numerous other 

 auxiliaries to modern railway management, which save the time and 

 economize the capital, while they accommodate the patronage of rail- 

 ways. I know not why, but, since he has left them out of the indict- 

 ment, we will follow his example. But Mr. Hudson does pause just 

 here — by what logical process is not apparent — to fulminate to the 

 length of many solid pages over and against the Standard Oil Com- 

 pany, its history, career, and the procedure by which, before the days 

 of " pools," it was able to force favorable contracts upon the railways 

 to its own vast advantage ; accumulating thereby assets almost as 

 enormous as either of the three or four private fortunes in which Mr. 

 Hudson sees such imminent peril to the republic. As we are just now 

 considering the railways, perhaps we might as well leave out the oil 

 company. We may admit, I think, however, in passing, that the Stand* 

 ard Company was an accident— a thing by itself, like the moon or the 

 Gulf Stream — from whose existence even a possibility of another can 

 not be predicated, since the present system of "pooling" associations 

 would render its repetition practically impossible. Mr. Hudson is per- 

 fectly right in announcing that this great corporation is not a char- 

 ity or an eleemosynary foundation of any sort ; that it does business 

 for the enrichment of its own stockholders rather than in behalf of 

 those of its rivals ; that it takes all it can get — is soulless, grasping, 

 and selfish. That it has been engineered by men of brains until it has 

 become in certain localities a practical monopoly may also be con- 

 ceded. That, so long as the laws under which it is incorporated per- 

 mit other incorporations for like purposes, it is a monopoly, legally or 

 derivately speaking, I am afraid must be denied. 



Premising merely that railways are not always the personal prop- 

 erty of their officers, but that their ownership, as a rule, shifts with 

 every sale of stocks made in Wall Street or on the 'Change of a dozen 

 capitals— and that, in Mr. Hudson's formula (page 5), " of the- exist- 



