ABE BUSINESS PBOFITS TOO LABGE? 105 



operators in half a century has produced no concern of magni- 

 tude. The almost uniform failures seem to prove that great 

 management must have great compensation, and in endeavoring 

 to get the skill without the pay the co-operators' dream has come 

 to naught. 



Now, this is equivalent to saying that the world finds its busi- 

 ness can be done at less cost than by co-operation. The latter 

 fails because it is undersold and unable to compete with such 

 skill as gets the better pay. 



Had Commodore Vanderbilt been content with the salary of a 

 steamboat captain he would never have developed into a great 

 business man and railroad manager. The prospect of great emol- 

 ument brought into exercise great powers, so that he cheapened 

 transportation in an astonishing degree and yet made money to 

 an astonishing amount. The people who saved four or five dol- 

 lars in a round trip between Boston and New York, and the 

 people who got their barrel of flour twenty-five cents less because 

 he ran a railway to Chicago, enjoyed the sensation at the time, 

 but, when they saw his fortune, could not refrain from tears to 

 think of the merciless robbery they suffered at his hands. It is 

 the old story of the farmers and the market-men told at the be- 

 ginning of this paper. The thing happened and succeeded, not 

 because Vanderbilt was a robber, but by virtue of his giving bet- 

 ter terms to people who had to travel and had to eat bread. His 

 inducements were such that he got the business. Suppose he and 

 some others of the same kind of enterprise had not come upon the 

 stage, what would have been the result ? Evidently the old ways 

 of business would have continued. We should still be going to 

 Buffalo on canal-boats and creeping along the streets of our cities 

 in dilapidated omnibuses, still be doing our journeying in stage- 

 coaches over dusty roads and tedious hills at a great sacrifice 

 of time, money, comfort, and strength. The enterprise of the 

 money-makers has profited everybody else by exciting production 

 and accumulation. The money-makers have taken pay not out 

 of labor, but out of the increased production and savings which 

 their efforts have secured. Individuals have sometimes suffered. 

 The omnibuses were killed when the horse-car came, and A. T. 

 Stewart did the business of a hundred small shopmen; but the 

 people at large saved time in getting where they were compelled 

 to go in one case, and got what they wanted at less cost in the 

 other. The street railroad makes ten times the money that the 

 stages did, and the people save money and time. The people can 

 do better by buying of Stewart, and therefore they buy. They 

 enriched him to the tune of thirty millions, clean cash. This is a 

 great fact ; but it does not show great robbery. It may show the 

 very opposite. The very class of persons who find fault with 



