Make an inventory of the Gas Trust’s property, find out how much it would cost to duplicate its plant, then subtract that sum from the capitalization of the Trust and the remainder is franchise property, and that belongs to the people. Go through the list of telephone, telegraph and railway companies the same way, and you will begin to get an idea of the value and earning capacity of your franchise property which has been stolen from you by your agents, the officeholders.
If the agent of an individual deeds away a piece of his private property and fails to make a just return to the owner, the law holds the title to be spurious and punishes that agent. But the officeholders, the agents appointed by all the individuals to care for their franchise property, deed it away to so-called public service corporations, pocket the proceeds and go scot-free!
The telephone, telegraph and all the corporations that use wires and electricity appropriate and use the people’s private property as well as their franchise property. Go on your roofs, New Yorkers, and count the electric wires that the thieving electricity corporations have attached to your houses or have strung across your lots without your permission. Remember that you own a space equal to the surface dimensions of your lot down into the bowels of the earth and up into the sky as far as you like to go. And nobody has the right to string wires across this space in the air or in the earth without your permission. The New York Telephone Company attached a wire to the roof of a house I had leased. I threatened to cut the wire. The company insolently replied that they needed that wire on my roof to carry on their business. I insisted on justice and my rights in the matter. The company then came round with a lease, which I signed, granting them permission to pass their wire over my roof, and I received a substantial annual rental for that privilege.
These corporations appropriate your private property as well as your franchise property for their own enrichment and pay nothing for it. They would string wires on your teeth if they needed them and you did not object. And to cap the climax they charge extortionate rates for service in order to pay dividends on watered stock. I wrote these facts a few years ago and offered the article to two daily newspapers in this town, and they did not dare to publish it. But thank God Tom Watson’s Magazine exists to tell the truth. New Yorkers, you ought to examine the fences around your backyards. You surely own them, and they are valuable property. They produce an enormous income to—the telephone company. Tens of thousands of yards of telephone wires are strung on these fences. The company uses them to get wires into your houses, in order to charge you extortionate prices for ’phone service. The company will tell you they need these fences to give you ’phone service. That answer reminds me of the answer given by a negro girl caught stealing raisins from her mistress’s bureau drawer. “Why did you steal those raisins?” asked the mistress. Sally replied, “Why, missus, dey’s good.”
The Cause of the Congregating
“MY friends,” began the Great Man, in a voice admirably adapted for declamatory purposes, as he stepped out upon the platform of the car and beheld the major portion of the inhabitants of the wayside hamlet seething and jostling around the station, “I thank you from the bottom of my heart for this enthusiastic greeting, this spontaneous outpouring of your best citizens, this wholesale welcome, this——”
“Wholesale gran’mother!” broke in a youthful and pessimistic voice. “It ain’t you that’s the attraction—a big fat drummer is havin’ the gol-rammedest fit you ever had the pleasure of witnessin’, right there in the waitin’-room!”
That Fateful Day