MIGHT OF THE RAILROAD OWNERS.
In contrast to the slow, almost creeping pace of the factory owners in the race for wealth, the railroad owners sprang at once into the lists of mighty wealth-possessers, armed with the most comprehensive and puissant powers and privileges, and vested with a sweep of properties beside which those of the petty industrial bosses were puny. Railroad owners, we say; the distinction is necessary between the 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 The one might construct, but it often happened that by means of cunning, fraud and corruption, the builders were superseded by another set of men who vaulted into possession.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.