Wealth against commonwealth

by Henry Demarest Lloyd

One of the company, who has been a conspicuous candidate for a nomination to the presidency of the United States, testified that the price of matches was kept up to pay the large sums of money expended to exclude others from the match business, remove competition, buy up machinery and patents, and purchase other match factories. This was told in a suit between two stockholders on a question of their relative rights; but the court, of its own motion, declared the combination illegal, and took notice of the public interests involved.[5]

"Such a vast combination is a menace to the public," said the court. "It is no answer to say that this monopoly has, in fact, reduced the price of friction-matches. That policy may have been necessary to crush competition. The fact exists that it rests in the discretion of this company at any time to raise the price to an exorbitant degree." "Indeed, it is doubtful if free government can long exist in a country where such enormous amounts of money are allowed to be accumulated in the vaults of corporations, to be used at discretion in controlling the property and business of the country against the interest of the public and that of the people, for the personal gain and aggrandizement of a few individuals."

Within the last thirty years, 95 per cent. of the anthracite coal of America—practically the entire supply, it was reported by Congress in 1893—has passed from the ownership of private citizens, many thousands in number, into the possession of the railroads controlling the highways of the coal-fields.

These railroads have been undergoing a similar process of consolidation, and are now the property of eight great corporations. This surrender of their property by the individual coal-mine owners is a continuing process, in operation at this moment, for the complete extinction of the "individual" and the independents in this field. It is destined, according to the report of Congress of 1893,[6] to end "in the entire absorption ... of the entire anthracite coal-fields and collieries by ... the common carriers."

Anthracite coal is geographically a natural monopoly contained in three contiguous fields which, if laid close together, would not cover more than eight miles by sixty. But bituminous coal, although scattered in exhaustless measures all over the continent, is being similarly appropriated by the railroads, and its area is being similarly limited artificially by their interference.

"Railroad syndicates," says the investigation of 1888,[7] "are buying all the best bituminous coal lands along their lines in Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, and other Western States and Territories, no doubt with a view of levying tribute upon the people's fuel and the industrial fires of the country."

Canada remains unannexed politically, but its best coal deposits have become a part of the United States. In 1892 a syndicate of American capitalists obtained the control of the principal bituminous coal-mines of Nova Scotia. Among them were men connected both with the anthracite pool and with the combination which seeks control of the oil market of Canada and of the United States.

The process of consolidation is shown by official and judicial investigations to have been in progress in the bituminous fields at least as far back as 1871, with the same purposes, methods, and results as in the anthracite fields, though more slowly, on account of the greater number and vastness of the deposits. From Pennsylvania to the Pacific coast these are narrowed to the territory along the railroads, and narrowed there again to the mines owned or favored by the railroad managers.

The investigations by Congress in 1888 and 1893 both state that the railroads of the country are similarly becoming the owners of our iron and timber lands, and both call upon the people to save themselves. A new law of industry is rising into view. Ownership of the highways ends in ownership of everything and everybody that must use the highways.

The railroads compel private owners to sell them their mines or all the product by refusing to supply cars for their business, and by charging rates for the transportation of coal so high that every one but themselves loses money on every ton sent to market. When the railroads elect to have the output large, they furnish many cars; when they elect to have the output small, they furnish few cars; and when they elect that there shall be no output whatever, they furnish no cars.