Great Fortunes from Railroads | Page 8

have been laid before they would have found themselves hopelessly bankrupt.
Their wisdom was that of their class; they knew a far better method. This was to use the powers of government, and make the public provide the necessary means. In the process of construction the $250,000 would have been only a mite. But it was quite enough to bribe a legislature. By expending this sum in purchasing a majority of an important committee, and a sufficient number of the whole body, they could get millions in public loans, vast areas of land given outright, and a succession of privileges worth, in the long run, hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars.
A WELTER OF CORRUPTION.
So the onslaught of corruption began and continued. Corruption in Ohio was so notorious that it formed a bitter part of the discussion in the Ohio Constitutional Convention of 1850-51. The delegates were droning along over insertions devised to increase corporation power. Suddenly rose Delegate Charles Reemelin and exclaimed: "Corporations always have their lobby members in and around the halls of legislation to watch and secure their interests. Not so with the people--they cannot act with that directness and system that a corporation can. No individual will take it upon himself to go to the Capitol at his own expense, to watch the representatives of the people, and to lobby against the potent influences of the corporation. But corporations have the money, and it is to their interest to expend it to secure the passage of partial laws." [Footnote: Ohio Convention Debates, 1850-51, ii: 174.]
Two years later, at one of the sessions of the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, Delegate Walker, of North Brookfield, made a similar statement as to conditions in that State. "I ask any man to say," he asked, "if he believes that any measure of legislation could be carried in this State, which was generally offensive to the corporations of the Commonwealth? It is very rarely the case that we do not have a majority in the legislature who are either presidents, directors or stockholders in incorporated companies. This is a fact of very grave importance." [Footnote: Debates in the Massachusetts Convention, 1853, iii: 59.] Two-thirds of the property in Massachusetts, Delegate Walker pointed out, was owned by corporations.
In 1857 an acrimonious debate ensued in the Iowa Constitutional Convention over an attempt to give further extraordinary power to the railroads. Already the State of Iowa had incurred $12,000,000 in debts in aiding railroad corporations. "I fear," said Delegate Traer, "that it is very often the case that these votes (on appropriations for railroads) are carried through by improper influences, which the people, if left alone, would, upon mature reflection, never have adopted." [Footnote: Constitutional Debates, Iowa, 1857, ii: 777.]
IMPOTENCE OF THE PEOPLE.
These are but a very few of the many instances of the debauching of every legislature in the United States. No matter how furiously the people protested at this giving away of their resources and rights, the capitalists were able to thwart their will on every occasion. In one case a State legislature had been so prodigal that the people of the State demanded a Constitutional provision forbidding the bonding of the State for railroad purposes. The Constitutional Convention adopted this provision. But the members had scarcely gone to their homes before the people discovered how they had been duped. The amendment barred the State from giving loans, but (and here was the trick) it did not forbid counties and municipalities from doing so. Thereupon the railroad capitalists proceeded to have laws passed, and bribe county and municipal officials all over the State to issue bonds and to give them terminal sites and other valuable privileges for nothing. In every such case the railroad owners in subsequent years sneaked legislation through in practically every State, or resorted to subterfuges, by which they were relieved from having to pay back those loans.
Hundreds of millions of dollars, exacted from the people in taxation, were turned over to the railroad corporations, and little of it was ever returned. As for the land grants to railroads, they reached colossal proportions. From 1850 to 1872 Congress gave not less than 155,504,994.59 acres of the public domain either direct to railroad corporations, or to the various States, to be transferred to those corporations.
Much of this immense area was given on the condition that unless the railroads were built, the grants were to be forfeited. But the capitalists found no difficulty in getting a thoroughly corrupt Congress to extend the period of construction in cases where the construction had not been done. Of the 155,000,000 acres, a considerable portion of it valuable mineral, coal, timber and agricultural land, only 607,741 acres were forfeited by act of Congress, and even much of these were restored to the railroads by judicial decisions. [Footnote: