In Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois the several legislatures had denied to all, except domestic corporations, the right to exercise the power of eminent domain. This law had been passed at recent sessions of their legislatures at the instance of certain railroad companies to exclude our line. The people of these several states had been much incensed when the laws mentioned were enacted. Had the initiative and referendum been in force there as in Idaho this would not have been a serious impediment. We could then have gone among the indignant citizens and procured a petition signed by twenty per cent of the voters of the state asking that the obnoxious laws be submitted to the popular vote.
Such was the feeling against the corrupt corporations at the time that people would have hastened to sign such a petition. But they had no initiative and referendum law, and so were at the mercy of the corruptionists.
The plain reason why the competing railroads desired to exclude our line, and why the farmers desired to have it enter these states, was the understanding that we would reduce all rates, both passenger and freight, to the great advantage of the farmers.
In fact, we designed to make a reduction in these respects which would mean ruin for all competing lines.
We were able to do this.
In the first place the road had cost us nothing but labor, except what we paid in cash to purchase the Rapid Valley Road and the right of way over the lands of certain hostile farmers. Even this cash represented our labor and was valuable only as it would purchase other labor or its products.
Then the competitive roads had been enormously expensive to build. The projectors were compelled, when they proposed their enterprises, to bribe a large number of so-called capitalists to advance money which had doubtless been intrusted to them by laborers for investment. Such capitalists, having little they could call their own, must needs obtain it.
So these railroad builders and their financiers placed side by side with the genuine million won from labor a false and pretended million which had its inception in and owed its existence to fraud. Then the true and false were made to pass together, with extended hands demanding of the toiler a portion of his product as their lawful dues. The one was just, the other a fiction and a sham.
False stock, which never had any basis in labor; false bonds, which had no mission except to defraud labor of its product; false pretenses, which made it possible for knaves to live by their wits, were the excuses which capitalists put forth for those extortionate rates by which the people were impoverished.
Our railroad represented no such presumptuous and dastardly pretensions. We came as labor should come to labor, asking no more and no less than labor’s honest dues.