Improvements are expensive; human life is contemptibly cheap; so long as there is a surplus of labor it is held to be commercial folly to go to the unnecessary expense of protecting an article of merchandise which can be had so cheaply. Human tragedies do not enter into the making of profit and loss accounts; outlays for mechanical appliances do. Assuredly this is a business age wherein profits must take precedence over every other consideration, which principle has been most elaborately enunciated and established by a long list of exalted court decisions. Yea, and the very magnates whose power rests on force and fraud are precisely those who insidiously dictate what men shall be appointed to these omniscient courts, before whose edicts all men are expected to bow in speechless reverence. [Footnote: This is far from being a rhetorical figure of speech. Witness the dictating of the appointment and nominations of judges by the Standard Oil Company (which now owns immense railroad systems and industrial plants) as revealed by certain authentic correspondence of that trust made public in the Presidential campaign of 1908.]
CHAPTER VIII
FURTHER ASPECTS OF THE VANDERBILT FORTUNE
The juggling of railroads and the virtual seizure of coal mines were by no means the only accomplishments of the Vanderbilt family in the years under consideration. Colorless as was the third generation, undistinguished by any marked characteristic, extremely commonplace in its conventions, it yet proved itself a worthy successor of Commodore Vanderbilt. The lessons he had taught of how to appropriate wealth were duly followed by his descendants, and all of the ancestral methods were closely adhered to by the third generation. Whatever might be its pretensions to a certain integrity and to a profound respectability, there was really no difference between its methods and those of the Commodore. Times had changed; that was all. What had once been regarded as outright theft and piracy were now cloaked under high-sounding phrases as "corporate extension" and "high finance" and other catchwords calculated to lull public suspicion and resentment. A refinement of phraseology had set in; and it served its purpose.
Concomitantly, while executing the transactions already described, the Vanderbilts of the third generation put through many others, both large and small, which were converted into further heaps of wealth. An enumeration of all of these diverse frauds would necessitate a tiresome presentation. A few examples will suffice.
The small frauds were but lesser in relation to the larger. At this period of the economic development of the country, when immense thefts were being consummated, a fraud had to rise to the dignity of at least fifty million dollars to be regarded a large one. The law, it is true, proscribed any theft involving more than $25 as grand larceny, but it was law applying to the poor only, and operative on them exclusively. The inordinately rich were beyond all law, seeing that they could either manufacture it, or its interpretation, at will. Among the conspicuous, audacious capitalists the fraud of a few paltry millions shrank to the modesty of a small, cursory, off-hand operation. Yet, in the aggregate, these petty frauds constituted great results, and for that reason were valued accordingly.
AN $8,000,000 AREA CONFISCATED.
Such a slight fraud was, for instance, the Vanderbilts' confiscation of an entire section of New York City. In 1887 they decided that they had urgent and particular need for railroad yard purposes of a sweep of streets from Sixtieth street to Seventy-second street along the Hudson River Railroad division. What if this property had been bought, laid out and graded by the city at considerable expense? The Vanderbilts resolved to have it and get it for nothing. Under special forms of law dictated by them they thereupon took it. The method was absurdly easy.
Ever compliant to their interests, and composed as usual of men retained by them or responsive to their influences, the Legislature of 1887 passed an act compelling the city authorities to close up the required area of streets. Then the city officials, fully as accommodating, turned the property over to the exclusive, and practically perpetual, use of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad. With the profusest expressions of regard for the public interests, the railroad officials did not in the slightest demur at signing an agreement with the municipal authorities. In this paper they pledged themselves to cooperate with the city in conferring upon the Board of Street Openings the right to reopen any of the streets at any time. This agreement was but a decoy for immediate popular effect. No such reopening ordinance was ever passed; the streets remained closed to the public which, theoretically at least, was left with the title. In fact, the memorandum of the agreement strangely disappeared from the Corporation Counsel's office, and did not turn up until twenty years later, when it was accidentally and most mysteriously discovered in the Lenox Library. Whence came it to this curious repository? The query remains unanswered.
For seventeen and a half acres of this confiscated land, comprising about three hundred and fifty city lots, now valued at a round $8,000,000, the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad has not paid a cent in rental or taxes since the act of 1887 was passed. On the island of Manhattan alone 70,000 poor families are every year evicted for inability to pay rent—a continuous and horribly tragic event well worth comparing with the preposterous facility with which the great possessing classes everywhere either buy or defy law, and confiscate when it suits them. So cunningly drafted was the act of 1887 that while New York City was obliged to give the exclusive use of this large stretch of property to the company, yet the title to the property—the empty name—remained vested in the city. This being so, a corporation counsel complaisantly decided that the railroad company could not be taxed so long as the city owned the title. [Footnote: Minutes of the New York City Board of Estimate and Apportionment—Financial and Franchise Matters, 1907:1071-1085. "It will thus be seen," reported Harry P. Nichols, Engineer-in-Charge of the Franchise Bureau, "that the railroad is at present, and has been for twenty years, occupying more than three hundred city lots, or something less than twenty acres, without compensation to the city.">[