Recently there was erected at Doylestown, Pennsylvania, a monument to a forgotten man, John Fitch, who in the year 1785 was known as one curious in experiments with steam as a motive power. Fitch built a steamboat, and had visions of many things in the way of steam locomotion. The life of this unknown man marks the extent of our backward vision in these matters; yet Fitch lived little more than a century ago. Indeed, the growth of the railroads of America has taken place in less than three-quarters of a century. And yet to-day we have more than two hundred thousand miles of railway, and as each day rolls by, we build from ten to twenty-five miles more. Railroading is a profession perfected in the hard evolution of American necessity. Our first railways were but attempts, guesses, desires, hopes, purely local propositions and not always well conceived as such. Yet they grew and multiplied, and presently, before we had time to think, they had multiplied over much. Then came the days of the railroad receiver. After the receiver there came the combiner. This man, in these bubble days of so-called prosperity, for a time undertakes to do what competition was not able to do. It is only for a time that any man or combination of men can escape the workings of the great natural law of competition. Neither monopolies nor trades-unions, neither the “trust” in capital nor the “trust” in labor can forever evade it. In time there will again be change; and meantime, ruin.
To-day there are five great centralizations or combinations of capital that control the railway situation in America. In these swift times of change these arrangements may not long remain permanent, and it is bootless to mention them specifically. The building of these thousands of miles of railway and the assembling of them together under industrial truce has been the product of a giant game in commerce, a commerce not to be confined wholly by the limits of this continent. The great ships built for the Orient are now an old story, an accepted enterprise that spells Europe on the one hand and Asia on the other.
As for our own marches, Alaska is to repeat at least in part the story of California. The Yukon and White Pass Railway is but a hint, a beginning. It is now upon the question of a railway from Circle City in Alaska to the Bering Sea, to connect there with a railway which shall eventually tap both China and Siberia! It is entirely within possibility that we shall in time see a continuous railway transportation from the Atlantic to the far-off straits that separate this country from Asia. Scientists tell us that over these straits there perhaps came once the ancestors of the aboriginal population of this continent. This population we have destroyed. There will also be destroyed all those nomad tribes of northeastern Asia that seem not useful in this great scheme which we call civilization. Alaska was long thought uninviting; yet railroad building there is feasible, and Alaska is feasible as residence for man; and railroad man is concerned with every corner of this globe that can serve as residence for human beings.
In the course of an address during the year 1901, a modern railway man[[60]] spoke in part as follows: “The twentieth century has been ushered into existence, and at its very dawn we find a struggle, not for the acquisition of new territory, not for the subjection of foreign countries, not a crusade to introduce a new and better religion, but a struggle between the great nations of the earth for supremacy in industrial pursuits and to supply the markets of the world. The nineteenth century has frequently been referred to as the Age of Transportation. Distribution is the handmaid of production. Bacon said: ‘There are three things that make a country great: fertile fields, busy workshops, easy conveyance for men and goods from place to place.’ The evolution that has taken place in the transportation of this country during the nineteenth century has been remarkable and unparalleled in the history of man. In the year 1800 it cost one hundred dollars to move a ton of wheat from Buffalo to New York. The regular rate is now a dollar and a half per ton, and it has been carried for a dollar. One hundred years ago we paid twenty-five cents per mile, traveling by stage-coach, without baggage; now we carry home-seekers from the East into California for approximately one-twentieth of the old rate.
“Our American railroads were, not a very long time since, owned largely outside the United States, but during the world’s panic that occurred in 1893, our British, German and Dutch friends discovered the necessity of selling something, and the only things in their strong boxes that they could sell without too much sacrifice were their American securities. They dumped them on the American market; and, notwithstanding the financial strain and the depression from which we were suffering, our American financiers mustered pluck, courage and money enough to buy them. They were bought at bargain prices. The advance in them has been stupendous, but it is worth a great deal to feel that we are not only blessed with the most improved and cheapest transportation in the world, but that our railroads are owned by our own people. The value of the railroads of the United States amounts to over one-fifth of the total wealth of the country.”
Another master in transportation,[[61]] in a public address delivered in 1902, gave yet further details in the vivid story of the extension of the iron trails of America: “While the railroads may have to answer for many mistakes of judgment or of intent,” said he, “on the whole the result has been to create the most effective, useful, and by far the cheapest system of land transportation in the world. In England the average amount paid by the shipper for moving a ton of freight one hundred miles is two dollars and thirty-five cents; in France, two dollars and ten cents; in Austria, a dollar and ninety cents; in Germany, where most of the railroads are owned and operated by the government, a dollar and eighty-four cents; in Russia, also under government ownership, where the shipments are carried under conditions more nearly similar to our own than any other country as respects long haul, a dollar and seventy cents. In the United States the average cost is seventy-three cents, or less than forty per cent. of the average cost in Europe.”
From the above comparisons this captain of transportation concludes that the railroad industries of this country are in a flourishing condition and that they should not be interfered with. Yet he concludes his comment with words that contain a corollary inconsistent with his earlier attitude, as we may later have occasion to note. He says: “For the first time in the history of this country thousands of our farmers are seeking homes in the Canadian Northwest, owing to the cheap lands offered in that country, and to the difficulty of securing such lands in the United Slates.” Earlier in the same address there is this epigrammatic statement: “Land without population is a wilderness; population without land is a mob.” If our Western Americans are leaving the flag of a republican government to seek land elsewhere, is not the inference fair that they do so because they have become a population without land? If this be true, assuredly it is the work of the iron trails.
We have an overgrowth, or, rather, too sudden and rank a growth, of transportation in America. It is attended with sudden changes, attended also with a certain weediness and immaturity, which we should be entitled to call un-American and undesirable, even were it not for the graver features that amount to revolutionary changes and to national menaces. Borne aloft upon a great wave of commercial prosperity, the American people is at the present time taking itself with entire seriousness as the greatest nation of the world. Its rapid industrial expansion has indeed been cause for marvel in the mind of all the world. There is a certain national comfort in these reflections, without doubt, and solace in the almost incomprehensible totals of the figures on which such assertions are grounded. Therefore it must come almost with ill grace to offer in these days of jubilation any word that might seem to indicate that perhaps, in spite of all this superficial prosperity, all may not be well with America as a nation, that all is not really well with our American man.
We are told that these are good times, the best we ever knew. It is triumphantly announced to us that we have in one year invested nearly seventy millions of dollars in foreign securities, largely in railroad bonds of Russia, in German Treasury bills, and English Exchequer loans. This is very good; it sounds well. As an offset to it one should apologize for offering the simple but multifold statements from the columns of the daily press bearing upon the greater cost of living in Western states. It is seven per cent. greater, says one dealer in statistics. It is twenty-five per cent. greater than it ever was, says another. The housewives of America, the best of all statisticians, say that in 1902 it cost thirty-three per cent. more to live than it did in 1899. These prices of bare commodities in these days of super-excellent transportation go well toward comparing with those we have shown as existing in the far-off mountain communities in the days of pack-horse and ox-team transportation. If this be so, is all well with America? The prices are the results of combinations and monopolies. The monopolies are based largely on non-competitive transportation. The iron trails are built over the hearthfires of America. The iron trails must do otherwise than thus.
We are informed that during the last year the balance of trade in favor of the United States was something like seven hundred millions of dollars. “Figures up to March twenty-first (1902), just finished,” says a careful report, “are so stupendous as to be staggering. * * * Nations have generally measured their prosperity by their foreign trade.”