The merchants and farmers throughout the Southern States have been ruthlessly robbed. The melon growers, the fruit men, the truck gardeners have, in thousands of cases, been so hounded and harried and victimized by excessive charges, secret rebates and discriminations in favor of other shippers, that they have been literally driven out of the field, broken and despairing.
Roadbeds, bridges, safety appliances, have been so wantonly neglected that almost every mile of the Southern Railway System from Washington southward has known its tragedy, where men, women and children were dashed to sudden, horrible death.
It was not the hard necessity of poverty that drove Sam Spencer to a policy so heartless as this. He had the means wherewith to put his roads in first-class order, had he wished to spend the funds in that way. It was not necessary for him to rob the men who were obliged to patronize his roads. If a fair, legitimate profit upon actual investment was all that he sought, he could have got it without doing the slightest injustice to any human being.
But he wanted more than that. A reasonable return upon the actual investment was not enough. So, he neglected the bridge until it fell, with its sickening horror, its shrieking mass of passengers doomed to frightful death. He neglected the safety appliances, and the full force of workmen, until some rotten crosstie, or defective rail, or open switch, or telegram which the dulled brain of an overworked engineer failed to comprehend, brought about derailments and collisions, with the heartrending consequence of crushed and burning cars, of crushed and burning men, women and children.
“The merchants and farmers throughout the Southern states have been ruthlessly robbed.”
Had the same proportion of the earnings been used to improve the property, as is the universal custom in Europe, there would have been the same security to the passenger that there is in Europe.
But the net profit to Wall Street would have been only a fair return upon the money actually invested—as it is in Europe.
Wall Street demands more than that. Sam Spencer’s task was to get what Wall Street wanted.
Have I not already said that Wall Street knows how to pick out its man?