Wealth against commonwealth

by Henry Demarest Lloyd

An intimation is given in the Continental press as to one of the motives under which the Russian government acted in promoting the alliance between the Russian and American oil men. It desired, it is said, to secure the influence of the powerful members of the oil combination in favor of certain plans for which Russia needed co-operation in America. There has been nothing for which the Russian government has so much needed "sympathetical co-operation" in America as for the ratification of the Extradition Treaty. The Russian government has obtained this ratification, and obtained it in a way which indicated that some irresistible but carefully concealed American influence was behind it. The New York World, in its editorial columns of May 25, 1894, made the suggestion that the power behind this treaty of shame was that of the oil trust, earning from the czar the last link in its chain of world monopoly. It asked if it was the influence of the oil combination that induced the Senate's consent to this "outrageous treaty." "Was this one of the conditions upon which that monopoly was permitted to secure its present concessions from Russia? Did it wield an influence in the Senate like that which the sugar trust has since exercised, though for an advantage of a different kind?" The Philadelphia Press points out that the Russian government had long and unsuccessfully sought to obtain the ratification of this treaty, but at last got it quickly and quietly. Did the oil combination, it asks, "succeed in bartering the character of this country as a political sanctuary for the monopoly of the world's markets?" Seldom has any public measure been so universally and so indignantly condemned in America as was this proposal to use the powers of Anglo-Saxon justice to return men who were accused only, and were, therefore, legally innocent, to be tried without jury, counsel, publicity, or appeal. Never has public opinion availed less. The Federal executive refused even to delay the ratification in deference to the sentiment against it. Those who were active in the agitation against the treaty found something inexplicable in the unresting and unlistening relentlessness with which it was pushed through. Napoleon said that in fifty years Europe would be all Russian or all republican. Even he did not dream that republican America would become Russianized before Europe. The San Francisco Call of March 3, 1894, discussing the report that a commercial treaty with China was under consideration at Washington, says the negotiation is in the interest of the oil combination. It warns the public that the trust is willing to reopen the opium trade in reciprocity to China for better terms for the admission of American petroleum. This free trade with China and Russia in the souls and bodies of Russians, Chinese, and Americans would add only another instance of the many manipulations of government which this combination has successfully attempted in all parts of the world—in the tariffs of France, Germany, Cuba, Canada, and our own country; in the raising or lowering of the governmental requirements as to explosiveness of oil sold the people in England and the United States, and in the subsidy legislation by which it got from Congress for its ocean steamers a privilege rigorously denied by law to all other citizens.

In this the oil trust is but an illustration. What it has done scores of other combinations have accomplished, though not with equal genius. The Hon. John De Witt Warner, member of Congress from New York, has published a list of one hundred trusts which have been able to influence the tariff legislation of the country in their favor. The orgy of the sugar trust and Congress, out of which the tariff bill of 1894 was born, was in the plain view of all the people. "The appalling fact already disclosed," the New York Daily Commercial Bulletin, the most important commercial and financial daily in the United States, said in its editorial columns of June 4, 1894, "is that for some months past the sugar trust has been the government of the United States." The Bulletin estimates that the profit to the trust of one detail of the tariff bill postponing the duty on raw sugar for six months will be $34,620,000. In all this our country is not singular. The governments of Europe are used as the instruments of profit for private enterprise to an extent which the people endure only because they do not understand it. The latest instance is one of the best. The Investor's Review of London, England, in May, 1894, calls attention to the fact that upon the accession of Lord Rosebery to the Premiership of England the hitherto outspoken opposition of the War Office to the Maxim gun had become entirely silent, and the gun had been put into use in the army without competitive trial with other machine-guns, some of them its superiors. "This is an unfortunate fact for Lord Rosebery," says the Investor's Review, "because of his relationship to the Rothschilds." This great house, the Review says, has "a strong pecuniary interest in the Maxim-Nordenfeldt Company," and his lordship's affinities to the house "have not in the past been confined to those of family relationship alone, but extend to community of interests on the stock exchange." The Review therefore appeals to Lord Rosebery, for his own sake and the sake of the government "to prove by his deeds that he not only has had nothing to do with it, but will peremptory stop this crime." If not, the Review hopes enough may be made of the scandal to overthrow Lord Rosebery's government, for it desires "to see a beginning made of the endeavor to purge Parliament of the guinea-pig director, the stock-gambler and punter, and the whole unclean brood of City 'bulls' and 'bears,' jobbers in patents, bribers and bribed, who help to degrade public life."

We of America are most sovereign when we sit in Constitutional Convention by our representatives, and change the fundamental law as we will. The Constitutional Convention gives us the unique power of peaceful and perpetual revolution, to make bloody and spasmodic revolutions unnecessary. Of all the inventions of that ablest group of statesmen the world has seen—the founders of this government—this is the greatest. The people of the State of New York are holding a Constitutional Convention in 1894 to enlarge the garment of 1846 to fit the growth of half a century. In that half-century the revolution in society and industry which had been getting under headway ever since the steam-engine and competition were invented has come to its consummation. But the basic law of the Empire State has faced this new world as changeless as the sphinx. Nearly half the other states have made new constitutions, or amended the old ones to bring law into line with life. Pennsylvania forbids the common carrier to become the owner of coal-mines, or to consolidate with competing carriers, or to give preference to any citizen. Michigan, Illinois, Nebraska, Colorado, and many other states have framed provisions to control the abuse of industrial and highway power. The State of Washington in its Constitution declares that "monopolies and trusts shall never be allowed in this State," and it forbids any association "for the purpose of fixing the price or limiting the production, or regulating the transportation of any product or commodity." The manual of the constitutions of the world prepared for the use of the New York convention shows that fifteen of the states of the Union have in one way or another recognized the revolution which has taken place in the industrial economy of the people, and sought to meet it with the necessary political safe-guards.

When the delegates of the citizens of New York State meet in May, 1894, at Albany, in such a time to face such problems, the press notes that a large proportion of them are corporation lawyers. The place of president of the convention is secured by the chief counsel of the oil trust. He is in Albany to resist the application to the Attorney-General of the State to move for the forfeiture of the charter of the principal corporation in the trust, and on his way he plucks the presidency of the Constitutional Convention. "It is truly a momentous event," he says in his opening speech, "when the delegates of many millions of people gather together after an interval of fifty years almost, for the purpose of revising and amending the fundamental law of the State." The delegates thus momentously assembled, when they came to choose the officer who was to wield over them a power as great as that of the Speaker over the Federal House of Representatives, momentously selected the most conspicuous attorney of the most conspicuous embodiment of the forces with which the people are in conflict. The president found words of kindly reference for many great questions—of education, suffrage, city government, and the like—but for the great questions of social power which fifteen states have found serious enough for constitutional cognizance he had not a syllable. No plan or even suggestion, great or little, for the new Constitution can reach the convention direct. All must go to the appropriate committee, to be smothered or reported, as the case may be. There are thirty of these committees, and they are made up by the president of the convention, who also designates their chairmen. Each committee has its subject, and the subjects cover the bill of rights, the regulation of suffrage, the control of corporations, the election of judges, future amendments of the Constitution, and every other part of the organic law. Practically the work of the convention will be the work of the committees, and the committees are the work of one who is not only the attorney of the oil trust, but is a part of the trust, a member of the organization. "I happen to own one hundred shares in the Standard Oil Trust," he said in his argument in Albany before the Attorney-General in behalf of the trust. The trust has given formal notice that out of deference to public opinion and the decision of the Supreme Court of Ohio, and in pursuance of an agreement with the late Attorney-General of New York,[649] it had dissolved itself. But this distinguished member disregards the dissolution, for reasons of personal convenience, as he tells the Attorney-General. "I have never gone forward and claimed my aliquot share." The character of this trust, of which the president and organizer of the Constitutional Convention persists in being a member to the extent of refusing to be "dissolved" out of it, has been adjudicated. It was, the Supreme Court of Ohio said,[650] "organized for a purpose contrary to the policy of our laws. Its object was to establish a virtual monopoly ... throughout the entire country, and by which it might not merely control the production but the price at its pleasure. All such associations are contrary to the policy of our State and void." A similar judgment has been passed upon the trust by the judiciary of the State of which this president of the Constitutional Convention, besides being an officer of the courts, is a citizen. It was entered into, the Supreme Court of New York has said,[651] "for the purpose of forming a combination whose object was to restrict production, control prices, and suppress competition, and the agreement was therefore opposed to public policy and void." And a higher court, the highest in the State, the Court of Appeals, decided in the sugar-trust, case that a trust was in avoidance and disregard of the laws of the State.

To the monopoly of oil, which was the starting-point, are being added by its proprietors, one after the other, as we have shown, a progressive series of other monopolies, from natural gas to iron. To these assets is now to be added our bill of rights. The long fingers of this power of mortmain reincarnate are long enough to reach from its counting-room to the Constitutional Convention. The new Magna Charta, to which the people look for help against void and unlawful combinations, is to be drafted by committees made up by the attorney of the chief of these void and unlawful combinations. The instrument which is to protect the people against monopoly will come to them only after every section has been exposed to the moulding touch of the greatest monopoly in history. "This business belongs to us," and theirs is the first and the last hand on the reins of the convention. The people can vote on the Constitution after it is made, but the trust will see it made. If the new Constitution is made so obnoxious that it is rejected, as that of 1867 was, the old Constitution will do for the next fifty years as for the last fifty. It is not monopoly that needs the revision.

Is this the end? When before the Interstate Commerce Commission, the head of the combination was asked:

"The properties included in your trust are distributed all over the United States, are they not?"

"Oh, not all over the United States. They are distributed."

"Are they not distributed, and are they not sufficiently numerous to meet the requirements of your business from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Gulf to the northern boundary?"

"Not yet."[652]