Wealth against commonwealth

by Henry Demarest Lloyd

Why do you refuse to answer? they were asked.

Because to do so would incriminate us.

Here, too, would-be successful men have gone gunning with the smokeless rebate for control of the wheat and corn and all the produce of the American farmer. Grain is fated to go the way that oil, hard coal, cattle, and meat have already gone. The farmer may remain the nominal owner of his farm under these circumstances, but he will be real owner of nothing but the piece of paper title.

First the product of the farm; then the farm. In America rises the shadow of a coming land-ownership more concentrated, more cruel, with the impersonal cruelty of corporate anonymity, than any the world has yet seen.

The grain broker who becomes, by favor of the general freight agent, the sole shipper and warehouseman of grain along a line of railroad, becomes thereby the sole buyer, and in the sole buyer of the produce we have the fast-growing germ of the future sole buyer of the land.

"Petroleum is the victim to-day," said the address, in 1872, of the Petroleum Producers' Union "to all newspapers and boards of trade opposing monopoly.... Coal, iron, cotton, breadstuffs, or live-stock may be in the grasp of the monopoly to-morrow." The prediction is more than half fulfilled.

"I ran away from home, and went to California," said a prominent grain merchant to the writer, "to escape being compelled to testify as to the freight rates I was paying. But these decisions that we cannot be forced to incriminate ourselves give me safe-conduct, and I am going home to take all the rebates I can get."

This is what is going on to-day in the "division of property" in America. Our society is woven together by the steam shuttle that moves between its farms and dinner-tables, its cotton-fields and factories, thousands of miles apart, and the shuttle is crooked. Out of $800,000,000 paid yearly in this country for the carriage of freight, it was estimated in 1888, by one who knew, that $50,000,000 to $100,000,000 goes to favored shippers.[768] As the result of personal examination made as an expert for stockholders, he declared that one of the great trunk lines had in the last twenty years thus diverted to favorites of the managers $100,000,000 of the money of the stockholders. Besides his yachts and trotters, every Captain of Industry worth talking about keeps his stud of railway presidents and general freight agents.

Public opinion, as yet only in the gristle in these new questions, turns upon first one and then another as the author of its troubles—the soulless corporation, the combination of corporations, railroad oppression, or what not. But the corporation is merely a cover, the combination of corporations an advantage, the private ownership of public highways an opportunity, and the rebate its perfect tool. The real actors are men; the real instrument, the control of their fellows by wealth, and the mainspring of the evil is the morals and economics which cipher that brothers produce wealth when they are only cheating each other out of birthrights.

The success of the same men in Europe shows that railroad discrimination is not the essence of their power, though it has in America been the chief instrument. By their wealth and their willingness to use it in their way they have become supreme. Supreme even where, as in England and Germany, they had no such unjust and crushing preference on the highways as in America. Back of highway privilege, back of money power, back of trade supremacy gained by these two means must be reckoned, as the essence of this phenomenon, the morality—our morality—which not only allows but encourages men to do each other to death, provided only the weapon be a bargain and the arena a market. "Everything shall not go to market," says Emerson; but everything does go to market. The millionaire is the modern hero, says the New York Evening Post. The men who have found in the rebate the secret of business success—and there are more of them than the public guesses—have only extended a fiercer hand to the results all were aiming at. They have used the smokeless rebate because it was the best gun. But if that had not been ready to their hand, they would have taken the next best. The course of conquest might have been slower, but, unless checked by moral interventions, it would have reached the same end. If society is founded on the idea that property belongs to the strongest, these will sooner or later get all the property, by bargains or by battles according to "the spirit of the age."