AND EXERCISE UNRESTRAINED POWER.
Visualizing this power one begins to get a vivid perception of the comprehensive sway of the Vanderbilts and of other railroad magnates. They levy tribute without restraint—a tribute so vast that the exactions of classic conquerors become dwarfed beside it. If this levying entailed only the seizing of money, that cold, unbreathing, lifeless substance, then human emotion might not start in horror at the consequences. But beneath it all are the tugging and tearing of human muscles and minds, the toil and sweat of an unnumbered multitude, the rending of homes, the infliction of sorrow, suffering and death.
The magnates, as we have said, hold the power of decreeing life and death; and time never was since the railroads were first built when this power was not arbitrarily exercised.
Millions have gone hungry or lived on an attenuated diet while elsewhere harvests rotted in the ground; between their needs and nature's fertility lay the railroads. Organized and maintained for profit and for profit alone, the railroads carry produce and products at their fixed rates and not a whit less; if these rates are not paid the transportation is refused. And as in these times transportation is necessary in the world's intercourse, the men who control it have the power to stand as an inflexible barrier between individuals, groups of individuals, nations and international peoples. The very agencies which should under a rational form of civilization be devoted to promoting the interests of mankind, are used as their capricious self-interest incline them by the few who have been allowed to obtain control of them. What if helpless people are swept off by starvation or by diseases superinduced by lack of proper food? What if in the great cities an increasing sacrifice of innocents goes on because their parents cannot afford the price of good milk—a price determined to a large extent by railroad tariff? All of this slaughter and more makes no impress upon the unimpressionable surfaces of these stocks and bonds, and leaves no record save in the hospitals and graveyards.
The railroad magnates have other powers. Government itself has no power to blot a town out of existence. It cannot strew desolation at will. But the railroad owners can do it and do not hesitate if sufficient profits be involved. One man sitting in a palace in New York can give an order declaring a secret discriminative tariff against the products of a place, whereupon its industries no longer able to compete with formidable competitors enjoying better rates, close down and the life of the place flickers and sometimes goes out.
These are but a very few of the immensity of extravagant powers conferred by the ownership of these railroad bonds and stocks. Bonds they assuredly are, incomparably more so than the clumsy yokes of olden days. Society has improved its outwards forms in these passing centuries. Clanking chains are no longer necessary to keep slaves in subjection. Far more effective than chains and balls and iron collars are the ownership of the means whereby men must live. Whoever controls them in large degree, is a potentate by whatever name he be called, and those who depend upon the owner of them for their sustenance are slaves by whatever flattering name they choose to go.