Aside from the great majority of the people, whose interests are indirectly but surely affected by any juggling with railroad properties and principles, is a great army of men who obtain their livelihood and that of their families by work on or for railroads. An army? Yes; more men than ever were seen in the largest army in the world. All of them are “effectives,” too—none of them can be found among “the sick, lame and lazy.” Chauncey M. Depew, President of the New York Central road, says truly: “With those who are actually in the service, and those who contribute by supplies, one-tenth of the working force of the United States are in the railroad service; and that tenth includes the most energetic men and most intelligent among the workers of this magnificent country. There are ten million working men in this country, and six hundred thousand are directly employed in the railway service. With their families they constitute a larger population than the largest of the States.”
Mr. Depew further says, with equal truth: “There is no democracy like the railway system of this land. Men are not taken out of rich men’s parlors and placed in positions of responsibility. Men are not taken because they are sons of such, and put into paying places in the railway systems; but the superintendents all over the country, the men who officer and man the passenger, the freight, and motive power and accounting departments, all of them come up from the bottom. Are you going to stop this thing? No! There are no men being born or to be born who are to be by inheritance the superintendents, treasurers, comptrollers, auditors, the freight and ticket agents, the conductors, the yard masters, who are to be the master mechanics, the foremen of the shops, of the future. They are not born. They have got to be made and come from the bottom up. And in every one of these departments to-day, in every railroad in the United States, in the humblest positions, earning the smallest salaries, are men, who within the next twenty-five years, are to fill all these places by promotion. Don’t tell me there is no chance to rise in this country.”
When this army grumbles, as once in a while it does, there is good cause for alarm; not that they, like the disaffected of other armies, may do damage to life and property, but because their troubles are almost always traceable to stock-juggling rascalities, from which the men have no hope of redress. Some of the companies allow no business operations to interfere with the rights of their employees. Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt is probably the most extensive owner of railway stock in the world, but he finds time to see his own employees frequently, and has even built and furnished a handsome club-room for them. He has also been active in assisting the Young Men’s Christian Association in establishing reading rooms at railway centres. President Charles Francis Adams, of the Union Pacific Company, found time not long ago to publish, in a magazine article, the outline of a system for retaining and encouraging competent employees. President Roberts, of the great Pennsylvania road, is as proud of his men as any general ever was of his army.
These railroad magnates, and others who might be named, are setting a good example, which it is to be hoped some other officials will have sense enough to follow. It is bad enough for stockholders to be annoyed and impoverished by stock-juggling operations, but when the employees also suffer the whole country suffers with them. It is an unpardonable crime for any company, managing a road which deserves to exist, to take such good care of its managers that its employees must strike and even fight to be sure of living wages. Railway strikes hurt every traveller, every shipper, every receiver in the country. They never would begin if managers were honest. Stick a pin here and keep your eye on it.
CHAPTER XIX.
BANKS AND BANKING.
WE are told by an old chronicler of the quaint and curious that in ancient times a number of Hebrews scattered in the cities along the shores of the Mediterranean conducted a most profitable banking business without the use of capital, by drawing one upon the other, in a perfect circle, the draft upon one being taken up by the next banker in the series, and so on ad infinitum.
Perhaps it will not do to scrutinize this story too closely, but there are many instances of almost as odd and ingenious devices in the history of banking. It was not until within a comparatively recent period that banks began to issue circulating notes. The early bankers were for the most part merely lenders of money, and this species of banker was called into existence very early in the world’s history. In fact, he was the natural result of the invention of money.
“A simple invention,” says Carlyle, “it was in the Old World grazier, sick of lugging his ox about the country until he could get it bartered for corn or oil, to take a piece of leather and thereon scratch or stamp the mere figure of an ox (pecus), put it in his pocket and call it pecunia, money. Yet hereby did barter grow sale; the leather money is now golden and paper, and all miracles have been out-miracled; for there are Rothschilds and English national debts; and whoso has sixpence is sovereign to the length of sixpence over all men; commands cooks to feed him, philosophers to teach him, kings to mount guard over him—to the length of sixpence.”
It has been claimed on behalf of the bankers’ craft that they date back to Abraham, because it is recorded that he weighed out four hundred shekels of silver as the purchase-money for the cave and field of Macpelah wherein to bury Sarah. But this is rather far-fetched. Livy, however, writes of the tables of the money-changers in the Roman forum existing 300 years before Christ, and later Latin writers refer to deposits, checks and drafts, with all the familiarity of a financier of the present day, as if they were in general use. In these days, when the capitalists of the world are puzzled to invest their money safely to yield them three per cent., it is refreshing to remember that the old Greek bankers or money-lenders exacted as much as thirty-six per cent. a year from the spendthrift youths or embarrassed merchants of that day. Aristophanes, in one of his comedies, makes a money-lender bitterly bewail the fact that he has only been able to get four per cent. on his loan. The Greek bankers used the temples as safe-deposit vaults for the storage of their treasures, and seem to have taken the priests into a sort of partnership. Something of the same sort probably prevailed among the Jews, and it is not difficult to believe that they were usurious, for the Saviour, when He overturned their tables in the temple, called them thieves—“My house shall be called the house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves.”
During succeeding ages, however, the methods of banking seem to have been lost until re-discovered and re-established by the Jews. A bank was established at Venice in the latter part of the twelfth century, another at Genoa in 1345, and they came into existence in several of the Dutch cities early in the seventeenth century. All of these were, in a sense, state banks, lending money to the state, and exercising their functions under its authority and protection. The Jews, and the Lombards, who had been taught in their schools, were almost the only money-lenders of Europe from the twelfth to the fifteenth century.