EXPRESS COMBINATIONS
In 1850, Wells and Company, Livingston and Company, and Butterfield, Wasson and Company so far violated the contemporaneously sacrosanct belief in the greater efficiency of the competitive system and the contemporaneously pseudo-religious authority of the whole principle of competition as to combine into one large corporation, the American Express Company. Later, Wells, Fargo and Company organized as a joint stock company with a capital of $300,000. The year 1854 saw the consolidation of Adams and Company, Harnden and Company, Thompson and Company, and Kingsley and Company into the Adams Express Company, and in the same year the United States Express Company was organized. The origin of the Southern Express Company dates from 1886—it is controlled by and is recognized as a part of the Adams Express Company. These four express companies continued through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth as the four great branches of the express service system of the United States. It is true that there existed by their side a number of other companies, but the latter were subsidiary, local and comparatively unimportant. The fields of activities of these four great national systems were as follows: Adams-Southern—the East, middle West, and several western routes, and the South; American—the East, middle West and trans-Mississippi; United States—the East outside of New England and the middle West, with several western routes; and Wells-Fargo—the far West and the Southwest, with several eastern routes. But there have long been complete understanding and gentlemen's agreements among the separate companies; and for practical purposes they formed, not four units of competition for the express business of the country, but four branches of one organization. Several Canadian companies also do business in the United States.