PART I.—Objections to National Ownership Considered.
When the paper published in the February Arena, entitled “The Farmer, the Investor, and the Railway,” was written, the writer was not ready to accept national ownership as a solution of the railway problem; but the occurrences attending the flurries of last autumn in the money markets, when half a dozen men, in order to obtain control of certain railways, entered into a conspiracy that came near wrecking the entire industrial and commercial interests of the country, having shed a lurid light upon the enormous and baleful power which the corporate control of the railways places in the hands of what Theodore Roosevelt aptly termed “the dangerous wealthy classes,” has had the effect of converting to the advocacy of national ownership not only the writer but vast numbers of conservative people of the central, western, and southern States to whom the question now assumes this form: “Which is to be preferred: a master in the shape of a political party that it is possible to dislodge by the use of the ballot, or one in the shape of ten or twenty Goulds, Vanderbilts, Huntingtons, Rockefellers, Sages, Dillons, and Brices who never die and whom it will be impossible to dislodge by the use of the ballot?” The particular Gould or Vanderbilt may die, as did that Vanderbilt to whom was ascribed the aphorism “The public be damned,” but the spirit and power of the Goulds and Vanderbilts never dies.