THE CALL OF THE LAND 



though the promoter's remains unknown. 

 Still, their office and even their service is 

 wholly secondary; and they would never 

 have been called in or thought of had not 

 the promoter pioneered the way and made 

 the dry bones live. 



The view is nearly as common as it is 

 erroneous, that promoting is inseparably 

 connected with the trusts, as if promoters 

 had never existed before trusts came to be. 

 This is an entire mistake, as pointed out in 

 great detail by Mr. W. G. Langworthy 

 Taylor in the Journal of Political Economy 

 for June, 1904. 



Oakes Ames was a promoter, if ever there 

 was one. Commodore Vanderbilt was a 

 promoter. Our earlier railways and rail- 

 way combinations no less than our more 

 recent colossal railway systems, were born 

 of promoters' efforts. The years after 1870, 

 before any trust had appeared, bristled with 

 promoters' schemes in Europe as in Amer- 

 ica the storm being central in Austria and 

 Germany, where a good part of the billion- 

 dollar French war indemnity fund sought 



256 



