RAILROADS AND TRADE-CENTERS. 337 



ones at the expense of less favored localities," as Senator Cullom boldly 

 charges, why is the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, owned in Baltimore, 

 and largely by that city itself — a corporate pet of the State whose 

 securities are a legal investment for trust funds — expending its earn- 

 ings and surplus like water to parallel the Pennsylvania in a territory 

 requiring massive construction, and fighting not only that corporation, 

 but the State of New Jersey, in order to get into the city of New 

 York at one end, as it has succeeded in getting into Chicago at the 

 other ? Why not save your millions, gentlemen managers of the Bal- 

 timore and Ohio Railroad Company, and build a few trade-centers for 

 yourselves at small expense ? Senator Cullom says it is simplicity 

 itself to make an artificial trade-center ; that railways have not only 

 had no difiiculty in doing it, but have actually and. tortuously thereby 

 diverted trade from natural trade-centers to the artificial ones created 

 by themselves. Why not, then, scatter as many trade-centers as your 

 business requires along the line of your railroad, and grow opulent 

 beyond the dreams of avarice by doing business between them, with 

 no possible competition to intrude and make you afraid ? Seriously, 

 is it not common information on the subject that the laws of trade are 

 as inexorable as those of gravitation, and that it is simply impossible 

 for human ingenuity to create a trade-center or to destroy one already 

 made by Nature ? Yea, and, moreover, that not only are human beings 

 unable to shift the trade-center, but they can not even alter the local 

 commercial centers of a trade-center. When Chicago was wiped out 

 by conflagration it occurred at once to certain clever owners of real 

 estate in the neighborhood of the heart of the city — within the city 

 lines, and of easy communication therewith — that their opportunity 

 had arisen. Instead of buying land in the old business centers at ten 

 thousand dollars a foot, and spending a reasonable fortune in carting 

 away debris before beginning to erect new walls let us go to work 

 at once and build on our own lands, they said ; the trade of this 

 vast metropolis can not wait, it will come and transact itself on our 

 premises as soon as completed. What was the fact ? The clever ones 

 built well and richly, and sat within and wooed the commerce of Chi- 

 cago to change its seat. But they wooed in vain. The commerce of 

 Chicago transacted itself knee-deep in its own ashes, and in tents and 

 hemlock shanties, until it could re-rear its own palaces over its own 

 head on the very spot where it had thrived before, and refused to 

 hear the voice of the real-estate charmers, who disappeared in bank- 

 ruptcy and disappointment as the result of trying even to move the 

 sites of the local habitations in which the commerce of a city dwelt. 

 And their successors have not yet forgotten the experiments of their 

 principals. And so it is throughout the continent. The honest farmer 

 in Vermont or in Central Illinois does not perhaps grumble because 

 a few superficial feet of land on the East River, in New York City, 

 or on the Chicago River, in Chicago, are worth more for trade pur- 



TOL. XXXII. — 22 



