[169]. As a means of facilitating commerce the national government also maintains various aids to navigation. It provides lighthouses, buoys, landmarks, and lifesaving stations. It has made surveys of the coasts and furnishes charts for the use of navigators. It trains and licenses pilots and makes rules to ensure the safety of vessels entering or leaving American ports. Much money has also been spent by the national government in the deepening and improvement of harbors. Mention should likewise be made of the greatest enterprise ever undertaken by any country for the promotion of maritime commerce, namely, the building of the Panama Canal, which connects two oceans and cost the United States more than three hundred and fifty million dollars.
[170]. In illustration of this it may be mentioned that in all the years from 1000 A. D. to 1750 A. D. there were only three inventions of remarkable value or interest; namely, printing, gunpowder, and the steam engine. But what of the period since 1750? The railroad, the steamship, the telegraph, the cable, the telephone, radio communication, the electric light, the electric motor and the trolley, the submarine, the airplane, the cinematograph, the phonograph, the internal combustion engine and motor vehicles of all kinds, the X-ray, and so on. These, moreover, are only the landmarks of mechanical progress, which is a relatively small item in the sum-total of human advance.
[171]. The customary par value of a share is one hundred dollars, but it may be fifty, ten, or five dollars. Occasionally shares of no par value are issued.
[172]. The stockholders in the original corporation received “trust certificates” in place of their shares.
[173]. During the presidential campaign of 1896 there was a good deal of popular outcry over the asserted failure of the government to “curb the trusts”. When Mark Hanna, chairman of the Republican National Committee, replied, “There are no trusts”, he was laughed at from one end of the country to the other. But he was right, for most of the trusts had been converted into holding companies.
[174]. In the long run this action did not amount to much, however, for the companies reorganized in a way which kept them within the letter of the law.
[175]. In order to evade the provisions of the Sherman Act many large corporations resorted to the plan of “interlocking directorates”. While forming no combination, merger, or holding company, they merely arranged that the various companies should elect the same men to their respective boards of directors, thus placing control of the companies in the hands of the same group of men. To put an end to this practice Congress in 1914 enacted the Clayton Act, which provided, among other things, that no person may serve as a director in two or more large competitive interstate corporations except banks and railroads, these latter being under separate regulations.
[176]. The Federal Trade Commission is made up of five members, each appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, for a term of seven years.
[177]. For those who are willing to look at the matter in this light, bearing in mind the old adage concerning the kindliness of fate to those who help themselves, the following helpful books are suggested: Frederick J. Allen, A Guide to the Study of Occupations (Cambridge, 1921). A survey of all the best literature on the subject. Frederic M. Giles and I. K. Giles, Vocational Civics (N. Y., 1920). A brief, interesting account of the opportunities in different occupations.
[178]. The employer, in fact, was often a corporation with neither body nor soul. The factories were in charge of managers whose function was to earn profits, not to look after the well-being of the employees.