174 Wisconsin state agricultural society . 
the public’s welfare, effected sometimes by obtaining exclusive 
national or state legislation or grants, and sometimes by buying 
up, crushing out, or combining with rivals, so as to destroy the 
legitimate workings of the law of supply and demand. Our 
transportation by rail, and even by water, is largely done in this 
way. Each railway, to start upon, has a practical monopoly of 
the country through which it runs, except, possibly, at the few 
points where it is crossed by roads with which it has not com¬ 
bined. The routes from the interior to the seaboard are domi¬ 
nated b}^ a railway despotism as lawless and rapacious as the rob¬ 
ber bands of the ancient Rhine. The commerce of the upper 
Mississippi is practically monopolized by a single steamboat line. 
The whole railway system of California and the navigation of 
her rivers are in the hands of a legalized band of robbers. The 
very transportation of the Columbia river is given up to a corpo¬ 
ration ; and wheat, worth $1.15 per bushel at Portland, has hardly 
a market value on its upper waters. Elevator “ riugs ” infest our 
lake cities, a tow-boat ring the mouth of the Mississippi, and 
producer and consumer must pay heavy toll for the privilege of 
transit. 
I might lengthen this list with showing the monoplies afforded 
by what are called protective tariffs, and by patents wrongly 
granted, or injudicionsly extended; and I might, name the well- 
organized monopolies in school books, in plows, that are not to 
be sold to clubs and granges for less than retail rates; but I 
forbear. 
All these evils of corruption, monopoly and extortion, though 
found in many forms of associated capital, are peculiarly and 
specially the work of our railway corporations. The most threate¬ 
ning danger to the liberties of Americans to-day lies in the dan¬ 
gerous power now held and wielded by our railway corporations. 
Vast monopolies dominate our thoroughfares to the seaboard. 
Their chartered powers are great: their financial strength is enor¬ 
mous. These, in their turn, are controlled by a few men, often 
of brutal instincts, who desire and appreciate only the power that, 
money gives in our wealth-thirst’ng communities. They are 
monied aristocrats, the basest form of nobility—a nobility that 
compels no nobleness. They are mainly unscrupulous in their 
