Great Fortunes from Railroads | Page 2

builders of the
railroads and the owners. The one might construct, but it often
happened that by means of cunning, fraud and corruption, the builders
were superseded by another set of men who vaulted into possession.
Looking back and summing up the course of events for a series of years,
it may be said that there was created over night a number of entities
empowered with extraordinary and far-reaching rights and powers of
ownership.
These entities were called corporations, and were called into being by
law. Beginning as creatures of law, the very rights, privileges and
properties obtained by means of law, soon enabled them to become the
dictators and masters of law. The title was in the corporation, not in the
individual; hence the men who controlled the corporation swayed the
substance of power and ownership. The factory was usually a personal
affair, owned by one man or in co-partnership; to get control of this

property it was necessary to get the owner in a financial corner and
force him to sell out, for, as a rule, he had no bond or stock issues. But
the railroad corporation was a stock corporation; whoever secured
control of a majority of the stock became the legal administrator of its
policies and property. By adroit manipulation, intimidation, superior
knavery, and the corrupt domination of law, it was always easy for
those who understood the science of rigging the stock market, and that
of strategic undermining, to wrest the control away from weak, or
(treating the word in a commercial sense) incompetent, holders. This
has been long shown by a succession of examples.
THE LEGALIZING OF CUNNING
Thus this situation, so singularly conflicting with the theoretical
majesty of the law, was frequently presented: A band of men styling
themselves a corporation received a perpetual charter with the most
sweeping rights and properties. In turn, the law interposed no effective
hindrance to the seizing of their possessions by any other group
proving its power to grasp them. All of this was done under nominal
forms of law, but differed little in reality from the methods during
medieval times when any baron could take another baron's castle and
land by armed force, and it remained his until a stronger man came
along and proved his title likewise.
Long before the railroad had been accepted commercially as a feasible
undertaking, the trading and land-owning classes, as has been
repeatedly pointed out, had demonstrated very successfully how the
forms of government could be perverted to enrich themselves at the
expense of the working population.
Taxation laws, as we have seen, were so devised that the burden in a
direct way fell lightly on the shipping, manufacturing, trading, banking
and land-owning classes, while indirectly it was shoved almost wholly
upon the workers, whether in shop, factory or on farm. Furthermore,
the constant response of Government, municipal, State and National, to
property interests, has been touched upon; how Government loaned
vast sums of public money, free of interest, to the traders, while at the
same time refusing to assist the impoverished and destitute; how it

granted immunity from punishment to the rich and powerful, and
inflicted the most drastic penalties upon poor debtors and penniless
violators of the law; how it allowed the possessing classes to evade
taxation on a large scale, and effected summarily cruel laws permitting
landlords to evict tenants for non- payment of rent. These and many
other partial and grievously discriminative laws have been referred to,
as also the refusal of Government to interfere in the slightest with the
commercial frauds and impositions constantly practiced, with all their
resulting great extortions, upon the defenceless masses.
Of the long-prevailing frauds on the part of the capitalists in acquiring
large tracts of public land, some significant facts have been brought out
in preceding chapters. Those facts, however, are only a few of a mass.
When the United States Government was organized, most of the land in
the North and East was already expropriated. But immense areas of
public domain still remained in the South and in the Middle West. Over
much of the former Colonial land the various legislatures claimed
jurisdiction, until, one after another, they ceded it to the National
Government. With the Louisiana purchase, in 1805, the area of public
domain was enormously extended, and consecutively so later after the
Mexican war.
THE LAND LAWS AGAINST THE POOR
From the very beginning of the government, the land laws were
arranged to discriminate against the poor settler. Instead of laws
providing simple and inexpensive ways for the poor to get land, the
laws were distorted into a highly effective mechanism by which
companies of capitalists, and individual capitalists, secured vast tracts
for trivial sums. These capitalists then either held the land, or forced
settlers to pay exorbitant prices