Great Fortunes from Railroads | Page 2

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 for comparatively small plots. No laws were in existence compelling the purchaser to be a bona fide settler. Absentee landlordism was the rule. The capitalist companies were largely composed of Northern, Eastern and Southern traders and bankers. The evidence shows that they employed bribery and corruption on a great scale, either in getting favorable laws passed,