The capitalists abundantly proved their devout patriotism by making tremendous fortunes from the necessities of that great crisis. They unloaded upon the Government at ten times the cost of manufacture quantities of munitions of war--munitions so frequently worthless that they often had to be thrown away after their purchase. [In a speech on February 28, 1863, on the urgency of establishing additional government armories and founderies, Representative J. W. Wallace pointed out in the House of Representatives: "The arms, ordnance and munitions of war bought by the Government from private contractors and foreign armories since the commencement of the rebellion have doubtless cost, over and above the positive expense of their manufacture, ten times as much as would establish and put into operation the armory and founderies recommended in the resolution of the committee. I understand that the Government, from the necessity of procuring a sufficient quantity of arms, has been paying, on the average, about twenty-two dollars per musket, when they could have been and could be manufactured in our national workshops for one-half that money."--Appendix to The Congressional Globe, Thirty-seventh Congress, Third Session, 1862-63. Part ii: 136. Fuller details are given in subsequent chapters.] They supplied shoddy uniforms and blankets and wretched shoes; food of so deleterious a quality that it was a fertile cause of epidemics of fevers and of numberless deaths; they impressed, by force of corruption, worn-out, disintegrating hulks into service as army and naval transports. Not a single possibility of profit was there in which the most glaring frauds were not committed. By a series of disingenuous measures the banks plundered the Treasury and people and caused their banknotes to be exempt from taxation. The merchants defrauded the Government out of millions of dollars by bribing Custom House officers to connive at undervaluations of imports. [In his report for 1862 Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, wrote: "That invoices representing fraudulent valuation of merchandise are daily presented at the Custom Houses is well known...."] The Custom House frauds were so notorious that, goaded on by public opinion, the House of Representatives was forced to appoint an investigating committee. The chairman of this committee, Representative C. H. Van Wyck, of New York, after summarizing the testimony in a speech in the House on February 23, 1863, passionately exclaimed: "The starving, penniless man who steals a loaf of bread to save life you incarcerate in a dungeon; but the army of magnificent highwaymen who steal by tens of thousands from the people, go unwhipped of justice and are suffered to enjoy the fruits of their crimes. It has been so with former administrations: unfortunately it is so with this." [Appendix to the Congressional Globe, Thirty-seventh Congress, Third Session, 1862-63. Part ii: 118.]

The Federal armies not only had to fight an open foe in a desperately contested war, but they were at the same time the helpless targets for the profit-mongers of their own section who insidiously slew great numbers of them--not, it is true, out of deliberate lust for murder, but because the craze for profits crushed every instinct of honor and humanity, and rendered them callous to the appalling consequences. The battlefields were not more deadly than the supplies furnished by capitalist contractors. [This is one of many examples: Philip S. Justice, a gun manufacturer of Philadelphia, obtained a contract in 1861, to supply 4,000 rifles. He charged $20 apiece. The rifles were found to be so absolutely dangerous to the soldiers using them, that the Government declined to pay his demanded price for a part of them. Justice then brought suit. (See Court of Claims Reports, viii: 37-54.) In the court records, these statements are included:

William H. Harris, Second Lieutenant of Ordnance, under orders visited Camp Hamilton, Va., and inspected the arms of the Fifty- Eighth Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteers, stationed there. He reported: "This regiment is armed with rifle muskets, marked on the barrel, 'P. S. Justice, Philadelphia,' and vary in calibre from .65 to .70. I find many of them unserviceable and irreparable, from the fact that the principal parts are defective. Many of them are made up of parts of muskets to which the stamp of condemnation has been affixed by an inspecting officer. None of the stocks have ever been approved by an officer, nor do they bear the initials of any inspector. They are made up of soft, unseasoned wood, and are defective in construction. ... The sights are merely soldered on to the barrel, and come off with the gentlest handling. Imitative screw- heads are cut on their bases. The bayonets are made up of soft iron, and, of course, when once bent remain 'set,'" etc., etc. (p. 43).

Col. (later General) Thomas D. Doubleday reported of his inspection: "The arms which were manufactured at Philadelphia, Penn., are of the most worthless kind, and have every appearance of having been manufactured from old condemned muskets. Many of them burst; hammers break off; sights fall off when discharged; the barrels are very light, not one-twentieth of an inch thick, and the stocks are made of green wood which have shrunk so as to leave the bands and trimmings loose. The bayonets are of such frail texture that they bend like lead, and many of them break off when going through the bayonet exercise. You could hardly conceive of such a worthless lot of arms, totally unfit for service, and dangerous to those using them" (p. 44).

Assistant Inspector-General of Ordnance John Buford reported: "Many had burst; many cones were blown out; many locks were defective; many barrels were rough inside from imperfect boring; and many had different diameters of bore in the same barrel. ... At target practice so many burst that the men became afraid to fire them" (p. 45).

The Court of Claims, on strict technical grounds, decided in favor of Justice, but the Supreme Court of the United States reversed that decision and dismissed the case. The Supreme Court found true the Government's contention that "the arms were unserviceable and unsafe for troops to handle."

Many other such specific examples are given in subsequent chapters of this work.] These capitalists passed, and were hailed, as eminent merchants, manufacturers and bankers; they were mighty in the marts and in politics; and their praise as "enterprising" and "self-made" and "patriotic" men was lavishly diffused.

It was the period of periods when there was a kind of adoration of the capitalist taught in press, college and pulpit. Nothing is so effective, as was remarked of old, to divert attention from scoundrelism as to make a brilliant show of patriotism. In the very act of looting Government and people and devastating the army and navy, the capitalists did the most ghastly business under the mask of the purest patriotism. Incredible as it may seem, this pretension was invoked and has been successfully maintained to this very day. You can scarcely pick up a volume on the Civil War, or a biography of the statesmen or rich men of the era, without wading in fulsome accounts of the untiring patriotism of the capitalists.

The vessels accepted by Vanderbilt, and contracted to be paid for at high prices, were in shockingly bad condition. Vanderbilt was one of the few men in the secret of the destination of Banks' expedition; he knew that the ships had to make an ocean trip. Yet he bought for $10,000 the Niagara, an old boat that had been built nearly a score of years before for trade on Lake Ontario. "In perfectly smooth weather," reported Senator Grimes, of Iowa, "with a calm sea, the planks were ripped out of her, and exhibited to the gaze of the indignant soldiers on board, showing that her timbers were rotten. The committee have in their committee room a large sample of one of the beams of this vessel to show that it has not the slightest capacity to hold a nail." [The Congressional Globe, Thirty- seventh Congress, Third Session, 1862-63, Part 1: 610.] Senator Grimes continued:

If Senators will refer to page 18 of this report, they will see that for the steamer Eastern Queen he (Vanderbilt) paid $900 a day for the first thirty days, and $800 for the residue of the days; while she (the Eastern Queen) had been chartered by the Government, for the Burnside expedition at $500 a day, making a difference of three or four hundred dollars a day. He paid for the Quinebang $250 a day, while she had been chartered to the Government at one time for $130 a day. For the Shetucket he paid $250 a day, while she had formerly been in our employ for $150 a day. He paid for the Charles Osgood $250 a day, while we had chartered her for $150. He paid $250 a day for the James S. Green, while we had once had a charter of her for $200. He paid $450 a day for the Salvor, while she had been chartered to the Government for $300. He paid $250 a day for the Albany, while she had been chartered to the Government for $150. He paid $250 a day for the Jersey Blue, while she had been chartered to the Government for $150. [The Congressional Globe, etc., 1862-63, Part i:610.]

There were a few of the many vessels chartered by Vanderbilt through Southard for the Government. For vessels bought outright, extravagant sums were paid. Ambrose Snow, a well-known shipping merchant, testified that "when we got to Commodore Vanderbilt we were referred to Mr. Southard; when we went to Mr. Southard, we were told that we should have to pay him a commission of five per cent." [Ibid. See also Senate Report No. 84, 1863, embracing the full testimony.]

Other shipping merchants corroborated this testimony. The methods and extent of these great frauds were clear. If the ship owners agreed to pay Southard five--and very often he exacted ten per cent. [Senator Hale asserted that he had heard of the exacting of a brokerage equal to ten per cent, in Boston and elsewhere.]-- Vanderbilt would agree to pay them enormous sums. In giving his testimony Vanderbilt sought to show that he was actuated by the most patriotic motives. But it was obvious that he was in collusion with Southard, and received the greater part of the plunder.

It was a rule amoung commercial men that at least two men capable of navigating should be aboard, especially at sea. Yet, with the lives of thousands of soldiers at stake, and with old and bad vessels in use at that, Vanderbilt, in more than one instance, as the testimony showed, neglected to hire more than one navigator, and failed to provide instruments and charts. In stating these facts Senator Grimes said: "When the question was asked of Commodore Vanderbilt and of other gentlemen in connection with the expedition, why this was, and why they did not take navigators and instruments and charts on board, the answer was that the insurance companies and owners of the vessel took that risk, as though"--Senator Grimes bitingly continued--"the Government had no risk in the lives of its valiant men whom it has enlisted under its banner and set out in an expedition of this kind." [The Congressional Globe, Thirty-seventh Congress, Third Session, 1862-63, Part i: 586.] If the expedition had encountered a severe storm at Cape Hatteras, for instance, it is probable that most of the vessels would have been wrecked. Luckily the voyage was fair.

In vain, however, did Senator Grimes plead. Vanderbilt's name was expunged, and Southard was made the chief scapegoat. Although Vanderbilt had been tenderly dealt with in the investigation, his criminality was conclusively established. The affair deeply shocked the nation. After all, it was only another of many tragic events demonstrating both the utter inefficiency of capitalist management, and the consistent capitalist program of subordinating every consideration of human life to the mania for profits. Vanderbilt was only a type of his class; although he was found out he deserved condemnation no more than thousands of other capitalists, great and small, whose methods at bottom did not vary from his. [One of the grossest and most prevalent forms of fraud was that of selling doctored-up horses to the Union army. Important cavalry movements were often delayed and jeoparded by this kind of fraud. In passing upon the suit of one of these horse contractors against the Government (Daniel Wormser vs. United States) for payment for horses supplied, in 1864, for cavalry use, the Supreme Court of the United States confirmed the charge made by the Government horse inspectors that the plaintiff had been guilty of fraud, and dismissed the case. "The Government," said Justice Bradley in the court's decision, "clearly had the right to proscribe regulations for the inspection of horses, and there was great need for strictness in this regard, for frauds were constantly perpetrated. . . . It is well known that horses may be prepared and fixed up to appear bright and smart for a few hours."--Court of Claims Reports, vii: 257-262.]

Yet such was the network of shams and falsities with which the supreme class of the time enmeshed society, that press, pulpit, university and the so-called statesmen insisted that the wealth of the rich man had its foundation in ability, and that this ability was indispensable in providing for the material wants of mankind.

Whatever obscurity may cloud many of Vanderbilt's methods in the steamship business, his methods in possessing himself of railroads are easily ascertained from official archives.

Late in 1862, at about the time when he had added to the millions that he had virtually stolen in the mail subsidy frauds, the huge profits from his manipulation of the Banks expedition, he set about buying the stock of the New York and Harlem Railroad.

This railroad, the first to enter New York City, had received from the New York Common Council in 1832 a franchise for the exclusive use of Fourth avenue, north of Twenty-third street--a franchise which, it was openly charged, was obtained by distributing bribes in the form of stock among the aldermen. ["The History of Tammany Hall": 117.]

The franchise was not construed by the city to be perpetual; certain reservations were embodied giving the city powers of revocation. But as we shall see, Vanderbilt not only corrupted the Legislature in 1872 to pass an act saddling one-half of the expense of depressing the tracks upon the city, but caused the act to be so adroitly worded as to make the franchise perpetual. Along with the franchise to use Fourth avenue, the railroad company secured in 1832 a franchise, free of taxation, to run street cars for the convenience of its passengers from the railroad station (then in the outskirts of New York City) south to Prince street. Subsequently this franchise was extended to Walker street, and in 1851 to Park Row. These were the initial stages of the Fourth Avenue surface line, which has been extended, and has grown into a vested value of tens of millions of dollars. In 1858 the New York and Harlem Railroad Company was forced by action of the Common Council, arising from the protests of the rich residents of Murray Hill, to discontinue steam service below Forty-second street. It, therefore, now had a street car line running from that thoroughfare to the Astor House.

This explanation of antecedent circumstances allows a clearer comprehension of what took place after Vanderbilt had begun buying the stock of the New York and Harlem Railroad. The stock was then selling at $9 a share. This railroad, as was the case with all other railroads, without exception, was run by the owners with only the most languid regard for the public interests and safety. Just as the corporation in the theory of the law was supposed to be a body to whom Government delegated powers to do certain things in the interests of the people, so was the railroad considered theoretically a public highway operated for the convenience of the people. It was upon this ostensible ground that railroad corporations secured charters, franchises, property and such privileges as the right of condemnation of necessary land. The State of New York alone had contributed $8,000,000 in public funds, and various counties, towns and municipalities in New York State nearly $31,000,000 by investment in stocks and bonds. [Report of the Special Committe on Railroads of the New York Assembly, 1879, i:7.] The theory was indeed attractive, but it remained nothing more than a fiction.

No sooner did the railroad owners get what they wanted, than they proceeded to exploit the very community from which their possessions were obtained, and which they were supposed to serve. The various railroads were juggled with by succeeding groups of manipulators. Management was neglected, and no attention paid to proper equipment. Often the physical layout of the railroads--the road-beds, rails and cars--were deliberately allowed to deteriorate in order that the manipulators might be able to lower the value and efficiency of the road, and thus depress the value of the stock. Thus, for instance, Vanderbilt aiming to get control of a railroad at a low price, might very well have confederates among some of the directors or officials of that railroad who would resist or slyly thwart every attempt at improvement, and so scheme that the profits would constantly go down. As the profits decreased, so did the price of the stock in the stock market. The changing combinations of railroad capitalists were too absorbed in the process of gambling in the stock market to have any direct concern for management. It was nothing to them that this neglect caused frequent and heartrending disasters; they were not held criminally responsible for the loss of life. In fact, railroad wrecks often served their purpose in beating down the price of stocks. Incredible as this statement may seem, it is abundantly proved by the facts.

Sinister rumors preceded what the evening of April 21, 1863, disclosed. He had bribed the New York City Common Council to give to the New York and Harlem Railroad a perpetual franchise for a street railway on Broadway from the Battery to Union Square. He had done what Solomon Kipp and others had done, in 1852, when they had spent $50,000 in bribing the aldermen to give them a franchise for surface lines on Sixth avenue and Eighth avenue; [See presentment of Grand Jury of February 26, 1853, and accompanying testimony, Documents of the (New York) Board of Aldermen, Doc. No. XXI, Part II, No. 55.] what Elijah F. Purdy and others had done in the same year in bribing aldermen with a fund of $28,000 to give them the franchise for a surface line on Third avenue; [Ibid., 1333-1335.] what George Law and other capitalists had done, in 1852, in bribing the aldermen to give them the franchises for street car lines on Second avenue and Ninth avenue. Only three years before--in 1860-- Vanderbilt had seen Jacob Sharp and others bribe the New York Legislature (which in that same year had passed an act depriving the New York Common Council of the power of franchise granting) to give them franchises for street car lines on Seventh avenue, on Tenth avenue, on Forty-second street, on Avenue D and a franchise for the "Belt" line. It was generally believed that the passage of these five bills cost the projectors $250,000 in money and stock distributed among the purchasable members of the Legislature. [See "The History of Public Franchises in New York City": 120-125.]

Of all the New York City street railway franchises, either appropriated or unappropriated, the Broadway line was considered the most profitable. So valuable were its present and potential prospects estimated that in 1852 Thomas E. Davies and his associates had offered, in return for the franchise, to carry passengers for a three-cent fare and to pay the city a million-dollar bonus. Other eager capitalists had hastened to offer the city a continuous payment of $100,000 a year. Similar futile attempts had been made year after year to get the franchise. The rich residents of Broadway opposed a street car line, believing it would subject them to noise and discomfort; likewise the stage owners, intent upon keeping up their monopoly, fought against it. In 1863 the bare rights of the Broadway franchise were considered to be worth fully $10,000,000. Vanderbilt and George Law were now frantically competing for this franchise. While Vanderbilt was corrupting the Common Council, Law was corrupting the legislature. [The business rivalry between Vanderbilt and Law was intensified by the deepest personal enmity on Law's part. As one of the chief owners of the United States Mail Steamship Company, Law was extremely bitter on the score of Vanderbilt's having been able to blackmail him and Roberts so heavily and successfully.] Such competition on the part of capitalists in corrupting public bodies was very frequent.

But an unlooked for obstacle was encountered. Vanderbilt had somehow got wind of the affair, and with instant energy bought up secretly all of the New York and Harlem Railroad stock he could. He had masses of ready money to do it with; the millions from the mail subsidy frauds and from his other lootings of the public treasury proved an unfailing source of supply. Presently, he had enough of the stock to corner his antagonists badly. He then put his own price upon it, eventually pushing it up to $170 a share. To get the stock that they contracted to deliver, the combination of politicians and Wall Street bankers and brokers had to buy it from him at his own price; there was no outstanding stock elsewhere. The old man was pitiless; he mulcted them $179 a share. In his version, Croffut says of Vanderbilt: "He and his partners in the bull movement took a million dollars from the Common Council that week and other millions from others." ["The Vanderbilts," etc: 75.]

The New York and Harlem Railroad was now his, as absolutely almost as the very clothes he wore. Little it mattered that he did not hold all of the stock; he owned a preponderance enough to rule the railroad as despotically as he pleased. Not a foot it had he surveyed or constructed; this task had been done by the mental and manual labor of thousands of wage workers not one of whom now owned the vestige of an interest in it. For their toil these wage workers had nothing to show but poverty. But Vanderbilt had swept in a railroad system by merely using in cunning and unscrupulous ways a few of the millions he had defrauded from the national treasury.

The cost of buying legislators to pass an act so provocative of popular indignation would be considerable, but, at the same time, it would not be more than a trifle compared with the immense profits he would gain. The consolidation would allow him to increase, or, as the phrase went, water, the stock of the combined roads. Although substantially owner of the two railroads, he was legally two separate entities--or, rather, the corporations were. As owner of one line he could bargain with himself as owner of the other, and could determine what the exchange purchase price should be. So, by a juggle, he could issue enormous quantities of bonds and stocks to himself. These many millions of bonds and stocks would not cost him personally a cent. The sole expense--the bribe funds and the cost of engraving--he would charge against his corporations. Immediately, these stocks and bonds would be vested with a high value, inasmuch as they would represent mortgages upon the productivity of tens of millions of people of that generation, and of still greater numbers of future generations. By putting up traffic rates and lowering wages, dividends would be paid upon the entire outpouring of stock, thus beyond a doubt insuring its permanent value. [Even Croffut, Vanderbilt's foremost eulogist, cynically grows merry over Vanderbilt's methods which he thus summarizes: "(1) Buy your railroad; (2) stop the stealing that went on under the other man; (3) improve the road in every practicable way within a reasonable expenditure; (4) consolidate it with any other road that can be run with it economically; (5) water its stock; (6) make it pay a large dividend."]

At the very inception of the railroad corruption began [Report of the New York State and Erie Railroad Company, New York State Assembly Document No. 50, 1842.] The tradesmen, landowners and bankers who composed the company bribed the Legislature to relinquish the State's claim, and then looted the railroad with such consummate thoroughness that in order to avert its bankruptcy they were obliged to borrow funds from Daniel Drew. This man was an imposing financial personage in his day. Illiterate, unscrupulous, picturesque in his very iniquities, he had once been a drover, and had gone into the steamboat business with Vanderbilt. He had scraped in wealth partly from that line of traffic, and in part from a succession of buccaneering operations. His loan remaining unpaid, Drew indemnified himself by taking over, in 1857, by foreclosure, the control of the Erie Railroad.

For the next nine years Drew manipulated the stock at will, sending the price up or down as suited his gambling schemes. The railroad degenerated until travel upon it became a menace; one disaster followed another. Drew imperturbably continued his manipulation of the stock market, careless of the condition of the road. At no time was he put to the inconvenience of even being questioned by the public authorities. On the contrary, the more millions he made the greater grew his prestige and power, the higher his standing in the community. Ruling society, influenced solely by money standards, saluted him as a successful man who had his millions, and made no fastidious inquiries as to how he got them. He was a potent man; his villainies passed as great astuteness, his devious cunning as marvelous sagacity.

The year 1868 proved a particularly busy one for Vanderbilt. He was engaged in a desperately devious struggle with Gould. In vain did his agents and lobbyists pour out stacks of money to buy legislative votes enough to defeat the bill legalizing Gould's fraudulent issue of stock. Members of the Legislature impassively took money from both parties. Gould personally appeared at Albany with a satchel containing $500,000 in greenbacks which were rapidly distributed. One Senator, as was disclosed by an investigating committee, accepted $75,000 from Vanderbilt and then $100,000 from Gould, kept both sums,--and voted with the dominant Gould forces. It was only by means of the numerous civil and criminal writs issued by Vanderbilt judges that the old man contrived to force Gould and his accomplices into paying for the stock fraudulently unloaded upon him. The best terms that he could get was an unsatisfactory settlement which still left him to bear a loss of about two millions. The veteran trickster had never before been overreached; all his life, except on one occasion, [In 1837 when he had advanced funds to a contractor carrying the mails between Washington and Richmond, and had taken security which proved to be worthless.] he had been the successful sharper; but he was no match for the more agile and equally sly, corrupt and resourceful Gould. It took some time for Vanderbilt to realize this; and it was only after several costly experiences with Gould, that he could bring himself to admit that he could not hope to outdo Gould.

The time was ripe for a new mortgage on the labor of that generation and of the generations to follow. Population was wondrously increasing, and with it trade. For years the New York Central had been paying a dividend of eight per cent. But this was only part of the profits. A law had been passed in 1850 authorizing the Legislature to step in whenever the dividends rose above ten per cent, on the railroad's actual cost, and to declare what should be done with the surplus. This law was nothing more or less than a blind to conciliate the people of the State, and let them believe that they would get some returns for the large outlay of public funds advanced to the New York Central. No returns ever came. Vanderbilt, and the different groups before him, in control of the road had easily evaded it, just as in every direction the whole capitalist class pushed aside law whenever law conflicted with its aims and interests. It was the propertyless only for whom the execution of law was intended. Profits from the New York Central were far more than eight per cent.; by perjury and frauds the directors retained sums that should have gone to the State. Every year they prepared a false account of their revenues and expenditures which they submitted to the State officials; they pretended that they annually spent millions of dollars in construction work on the road--work, in reality, never done. [See Report of New York Special Assembly Committee on Railroads, 1879, iv: 3,894.] The money was pocketed by them under this device--a device that has since become a favorite of many railroad and public utility corporations.

Unenforced as it was, this law was nevertheless an obstacle in the way of Vanderbilt's plans. Likewise was another, a statute prohibiting both the New York Central Railroad and the Hudson River Railroad from increasing their stock. To understand why this latter law was passed it is necessary to remember that the middle class--the factory owners, jobbers, retail tradesmen and employing farmers--were everywhere seeking by the power of law to prevent the too great development of corporations. These, they apprehended, and with reason, would ultimately engulf them and their fortunes and importance. They knew that each new output of watered stock meant either that the prevailing high freight rates would remain unchanged or would be increased; and while all the charges had to be borne finally by the working class, the middle class sought to have an unrestricted market on its own terms.

Laws were sold at Albany to the highest bidder. "It was impossible," Tweed testified after his downfall, "to do anything there without paying for it; money had to be raised for the passing of bills." [Statement of William M. Tweed before Special Investigating Committee of the New York Board of Aldermen. Documents of the Board of Aldermen, 1877, Part II. Document No. 8:15-16.] Decades before this, legislators had been so thoroughly taught by the landowners and bankers how to exchange their votes for cash that now, not only at Albany and Washington, but everywhere in the United States, both legislative and administrative officials haggled in real astute business style for the highest price that they could get.

One noted lobbyist stated in 1868 that for a favorable report on a certain bill before the New York Senate, $5,000 apiece was paid to four members of the committee having it in charge. On the passage of the bill, a further $5,000 apiece with contingent expenses was added. In another instance, where but a solitary vote was needed to put a bill through, three Republicans put their figures up to $25,000 each; one of them was bought. About thirty Republicans and Democrats in the New York Legislature organized themselves into a clique (long styled the "Black Horse Cavalry"), under the leadership of an energetic lobbyist, with a mutual pledge to vote as directed. [Documents of the Board of Aldermen, 1877, Part II, No. 8; 212-213.] "Any corporation, however extensive and comprehensive the privileges it asked"--to quote from "The History of Tammany Hall"--"and however much oppression it sought to impose upon the people in the line of unjust grants, extortionate rates or monopoly, could convince the Legislature of the righteousness of its request upon 'producing' the proper sum."

The printing presses were worked overtime in issuing more than $44,000,000 of watered stock. The capital stock of the two roads was thus doubled. Pretending that the railroads embraced in the consolidation had a great surplus on hand, Vanderbilt, instead of distributing this alleged surplus, apportioned the watered stock among the stockholders as a premium. The story of the surplus was, of course, only a pretense. Each holder of a $100 share received a certificate for $180--that is to say, $80 in plunder for every $100 share that he held. [Report of Assembly Committee on Railroads, testimony of Alexander Robertson, an expert accountant, 1879, i:994-999.] "Thus," reported the "Hepburn Committee" (the popular name for the New York State Assembly investigating committee of 1879), "as calculated by this expert, $53,507,060 were wrongfully added to the capital stock of these roads." Of this sum $44,000,000 was issued in 1869; the remainder in previous years. "The only answer made by the roads was that the legislature authorized it," the committee went on. "It is proper to remark that the people are quite as much indebted to the venality of the men elected to represent them in the Legislature as to the rapacity of the railroad managers for this state of affairs." [Ibid., i:21.]

Despite the fact that the report of the committee recorded that the transaction was piracy, the euphemistic wording of the committee's statement was characteristic of the reverence shown to the rich and influential, and the sparing of their feelings by the avoidance of harsh language. "Wrongfully added" would have been quickly changed into such inconsiderate terms as theft and robbery had the case been even a trivial one of some ordinary citizen lacking wealth and power. The facts would have immediately been presented to the proper officials for criminal prosecution.

But not a suggestion was forthcoming of haling Vanderbilt to the criminal bar; had it been made, nothing except a farce would have resulted, for the reason that the criminal machinery, while extraordinarily active in hurrying petty lawbreakers to prison, was a part of the political mechanism financed by the big criminals and subservient to them.

"The $44,000,000," says Simon Sterne, a noted lawyer who, as counsel for various commercial organizations, unravelled the whole matter before the "Hepburn Committee," in 1879, "represented no more labor than it took to print the script." It was notorious, he adds, "that the cost of the consolidated railroads was less than $44,000,000," ["Life of Simon Sterne," by John Foord, 1903:179-181.] In increasing the stock to $86,000,000 Vanderbilt and his confederates therefore stole the difference between the cost and the maximum of the stock issue. So great were the profits, both open and concealed, of the consolidated railroads that notwithstanding, as Charles Francis Adams computed, "$50,000 of absolute water had been poured out for each mile of road between New York and Buffalo," the market price of the stock at once shot up in 1869 from $75 a share to $120 and then to $200.

And what was Vanderbilt's share of the $44,000,000? His inveterate panegyrist, Croffut, in smoothly defending the transaction gives this illuminating depiction of the joyous event: "One night, at midnight, he (Cornelius Vanderbilt) carried away from the office of Horace F. Clark, his son-in-law, $6,000,000 in greenbacks as a part of his share of the profits, and he had $20,000,000 more in new stock." ["The Vanderbilts": 103. Croffut in a footnote tells this anecdote: "When the Commodore's portrait first appeared on the bonds of the Central, a holder of some called one day and said: 'Commodore, glad to see your face on them bonds. It's worth ten per cent. It gives everybody confidence.' The Commodore smiled grimly, the only recognition he ever made of a compliment. ''Cause,' explained the visitor, 'when we see that fine, noble brow, it reminds us that you'll never let anybody else steal anything.'"]

By this coup Vanderbilt about doubled his previous wealth. Scarcely had the mercantile interests recovered from their utter bewilderment at being routed than Vanderbilt, flushed with triumph, swept more railroads into his inventory of possessions.

His process of acquisition was now working with almost automatic ease.

First, as we have narrated, he extorted millions of dollars in blackmail. With these millions he bought, or rather manipulated into his control, one railroad after another, amid an onslaught of bribery and glaring violations of the laws. Each new million that he seized was an additional resource by which he could bribe and manipulate; progressively his power advanced; and it became ridiculously easier to get possession of more and more property. His very name became a terror to those of lesser capital, and the mere threat of pitting his enormous wealth against competitors whom he sought to destroy was generally a sufficient warrant for their surrender. After his consummation of the $44,000,000 theft in 1869 there was little withstanding of him. By the most favorable account--that of Croffut-- his own allotment of the plunder amounted to $26,000,000. This sum, immense, and in fact of almost inconceivable power in that day, was enough of itself, independent of Vanderbilt's other wealth, to force through almost any plan involving a seizing of competing property.

For a long series of years this base traffic has been constantly increasing, until it has become frightfully enormous. It would be presumed, from the immense quantities, and the great variety of inferior drugs that pass our custom houses, and particularly the custom-house at New York, in the course of a single year, that this country had become the great mart and receptacle of all of the refuse merchandise of that description, not only from the European warehouses, but from the whole Eastern market. [Reports of Committees, First Session, Thirtieth Congress, 1847-48, Vol. iii, Report No. 664:3--The committee reported that opium was adulterated with licorice paste and bitter vegetable extract; calomel, with chalk and sulphate of barytes; quinine, with silicine, chalk and sulphate of barytes; castor, with dried blood, gum and ammonia; gum assafoetida with inferior gums, chalk and clay, etc., etc. (pp. 10 and 11).]

In presenting a formidable array of expert testimony, and in giving a list of cases of persons having died from eating foods and drugs adulterated with poisonous substances, the House Committee on Epidemic Diseases, of the Forty-Sixth Congress, reported on February 4 1881:

That they have investigated, as far as they could ... the injurious and poisonous compounds used in the preparation of food substances, and in the manufacture of wearing apparel and other articles, and find from the evidence submitted to them that the adulteration of articles used in the every day diet of vast numbers of people has grown, and is now practised, to such an extent as to seriously endanger the public health, and to call loudly for some sort of legislative correction. Drugs, liquors, articles of clothing, wall paper and many other things are subjected to the same dangerous process. [House Reports, Third Session, Forty-sixth Congress, 1880-81, Vol. i, Report No. 199: 1. The committee drafted a bill for the prevention of these frauds; the capitalists concerned smothered it.]

The House Committee on Commerce, reporting the next year, on March 4, stated that "the evidence regarding the adulterations of food indicates that they are largely of the nature of frauds upon the consumer ... and injure both the health and morals of the people." The committee declared that the practise of fraudulent substitutions "had become universal." [House Reports, First Session, Forty-seventh Congress, 1881-82, Vol. ii, Report No. 634: 1-5.]

These few significant extracts, from a mass of official reports, show that the commercial frauds were continuous, and began long before Commodore Vanderbilt's time, and have prevailed up to the present.

Everywhere was fraud; even the little storekeepers, with their smug pretensions to homely honesty, were profiting by some of the vilest, basest forms of fraud, such as robbing the poor by the light-weight and short-weight trick, [These forms of cheating exist at present to a greater extent than ever before. It is estimated that manufacturers and shopkeepers cheat the people of the United States out of $200,000,000 a year by the light-weight and short-weight frauds. In 1907 the New York State Sealer of Weights and Measures asserted that, in that State alone, $20,000,000 was robbed from the consumers annually by these methods. Recent investigations by the Bureau of Standards of the United States Department of Commerce and Labor have shown that immense numbers of "crooked" scales are in use. It has been conclusively established by the investigations of Federal, State and municipal inspectors of weights and measures that there is hardly an article put up in bottled or canned form that is not short of the weight for which it is sold, nor is there scarcely a retail dealer who does not swindle his customers by the light-weight fraud. There are manufacturers who make a specific business of turning out fraudulent scales, and who freely advertise the cheating merits of these scales.] or (far worse) by selling skim milk, or poisonous drugs or adulterated food or shoddy material. These practises were so prevalent, that the exceptions were rarities indeed.

If any administration had dared seriously to stop these forms of theft the trading classes would have resisted and struck back in political action. Yet these were the men--these traders--who vociferously come forth with their homiletic trades against Vanderbilt's criminal transactions, demanding that the power of him and his kind be curbed.

It was not at all singular that they put their protests on moral grounds. In a form of society where each man is compelled to fight every other man in a wild, demoralizing struggle for self- preservation, self-interest naturally usurps the supreme functions, and this self-interest becomes transposed, by a comprehensible process, into moralities. That which is profitable is perverted into a moral code; the laws passed, the customs introduced and persisted in, and the weight of the dominant classes all conspire to put the stamp of morality on practices arising from the lowest and most sordid aims. Thus did the trading class make a moral profession of its methods of exploitation; it congratulated and sanctified itself on its purity of life and its saving stability.

From this class--a class interpenetrated in every direction with commercial frauds--was largely empanelled the men who sat on those grand juries and petit juries solemnly passing verdict on the poor wretches of criminals whom environment or poverty had driven into crime. They were the arbiters of justice, but it was a justice that was never allowed to act against themselves. Examine all the penal codes of the period; note the laws proscribing long sentences in prison for thefts of property; the larceny of even a suit of clothes was severely punishable, and begging for alms was a misdemeanor. Then contrast these asperities of law with the entire absence of adequate protection for the buyer of merchandise. Following the old dictum of Roman jurisprudence, "Let the buyer beware," the factory owner could at will oppress his workers, and compel them, for the scantiest wages, to make for his profit goods unfit for consumption. These articles the retailer sold without scruple over his counter; when the buyer was cheated or overcharged, as happened with great frequency, he had practically no redress in law. If the merchant were robbed of even ever so little he could retaliate by sending the guilty one to prison. But the merchant himself could invidiously and continuously rob the customer without fear of any law. All of this was converted into a code of moralities; and any bold spirit who exposed its cant and sham was denounced as an agitator and as an enemy of law and order. [A few progressive jurists in the International Prison Congress are attempting to secure the recognition in law of the principle that society, as a supreme necessity, is obligated to protect its members from being made the victims of the cunning and unscrupulous. They have received no encouragement, and will receive none, from a trading class profiting from the very methods which it is sought to place under the inhibition of criminal law.]

Vanderbilt did better than expose it; he improved upon, and enlarged, it and made it a thing of magnitude; he and others of his quality discarded petty larceny and ascended into a sphere of superlative grand larceny. They knew with a cynical perception that society, with all its pompous pretensions to morality, had evolved a rule which worked with almost mathematical certainty. This rule was the paradoxical, but nevertheless true, one that the greater the theft the less corresponding danger there was of punishment.

Instead of longer ignoring this demand, Vanderbilt now planned to make use of it; he saw how he could utilize it not only to foist a great part of the expense upon the city, but to get a perpetual franchise. Thus, upon the strength of the popular cry for reform, he would extort advantages calculated to save him millions and at the same time extend his privileges. It was but another illustration of the principle in capitalist society to which we have referred before (and which there will be copious occasion to mention again and again) that after energetically contesting even those petty reforms for which the people have contended, the ruling classes have ever deftly turned about when they could no longer withstand the popular demands, and have made those very reforms the basis for more spoliation and for a further intrenchment of their power. [Commodore Vanderbilt's descendants, the present Vanderbilts, have been using the public outcry for a reform of conditions on the West Side of New York City, precisely as the original Vanderbilt utilized that for the improvement of Fourth avenue. The Hudson River division of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad has hitherto extended downtown on the surface of Tenth and Eleventh Avenues and other thoroughfares. Large numbers of people have been killed and injured. For decades there has been a public demand that these dangerous conditions be remedied or removed. The Vanderbilts have as long resisted the demand; the immense numbers of casualties had no effect upon them. When the public demand became too strong to be ignored longer, they set about to exploit it in order to get a comprehensive franchise with incalculable new privileges.]

The first step was to get the New York City Common Council to pass, with an assumption of indignation, an ordinance requiring Vanderbilt to make the desired improvements, and committing the city to bear one-half the expense and giving him a perpetual franchise. This was in Tweed's time when the Common Council was composed largely of the most corrupt ward heelers, and when Tweed's puppet, Hall, was Mayor. Public opposition to this grab was so great as to frighten the politicians; at any rate, whatever his reasons, Mayor Hall vetoed the ordinance.

Thereupon, in 1872, Vanderbilt went to the Legislature--that Legislature whose members he had so often bought like so many cattle. This particular Legislature, however, was elected in 1871, following the revelations of the Tweed "ring" frauds. It was regarded as a "model reform body." As has already been remarked in this work, the pseudo "reform" officials or bodies elected by the American people in the vain hope of overthrowing corruption, will often go to greater lengths in the disposition of the people's rights and interests than the most hardened politicians, because they are not suspected of being corrupt, and their measures have the appearance of being enacted for the public good. The Tweed clique had been broken up, but the capitalists who had assiduously bribed its members and profited so hugely from its political acts, were untouched and in greater power than ever before. The source of all this corruption had not been struck at in the slightest. Tweed, the politician, was sacrificed and went to prison and died there; the capitalists who had corrupted representative bodies everywhere in the United States, before and during his time, were safe and respected, and in a position to continue their work of corruption. Tweed made the classic, unforgivable blunder of going into politics as a business, instead of into commercialism. The very capitalists who had profited so greatly by his corruption, were the first to express horror at his acts.

From the "reform" Legislature of 1982 Vanderbilt secured all that he sought. The act was so dexterously worded that while not nominally giving a perpetual franchise, it practically revoked the qualified parts of the charter of 1832. It also compassionately relieved him of the necessity of having to pay out about $4,000,000, in replacing the dangerous roadway, by imposing that cost upon New York City. Once these improvements were made, Vanderbilt bonded them as though they had been made with private money.

At the very time that he was watering stock, sliding through legislatures corrupt grants of perpetual franchises, and swindling cities and States out of huge sums in taxes, [Not alone he. In a tabulated report made public on February 1, 1872, the New York Council of Political Reform charged that in the single item of surface railways, New York City for a long period had been swindled annually out of at least a million dollars. This was an underestimate. All other sections of the capitalist class swindled likewise in taxes.] Vanderbilt was forcing the drivers and conductors on the Fourth avenue surface line to work an average of fifteen hours out of twenty-four, and reducing their daily wages from $2.25 to $2.

Vanderbilt made the pretense that it was necessary to economize; and, as was the invariable rule of the capitalists, the entire burden of the economizing process was thrown upon the already overloaded workers. This subtraction of twenty-five cents a day entailed upon the drivers and conductors and their families many severe deprivations; working for such low wages every cent obviously counted in the management of household affairs. But the methods of the capitalist class in deliberately pyramiding its profits upon the sufferings of the working class were evidenced in this case (as they had been, and since have been, in countless other instances) by the announcement in the Wall Street reports that this reduction in wages was followed by an instant rise in the price of the stock of the Fourth avenue surface line. The lower the wages, the greater the dividends.

The further history of the Fourth avenue surface line cannot here be pursued in detail. Suffice to say that the Vanderbilts, in 1894, leased this line for 999 years to the Metropolitan Street Railway Company, controlled by those eminent financiers, William C. Whitney and others, whose monumental briberies, thefts and piracies have frequently been uncovered in official investigations. For almost a thousand years, unless a radical change of conditions comes, the Vanderbilts will draw a princely revenue from the ownership of this franchise alone.

It is not necessary to enter into a narrative of all the laws that Vanderbilt bribed Legislature after Legislature, and Common Council after Common Council, into passing--laws giving him for nothing immensely valuable grants of land, shore rights and rights to land under water, more authorizations to make further consolidations and to issue more watered stock. Nor is it necessary to deal with the numerous bills he considered adverse to his interests, that he caused to be smothered in legislative committees by bribery.

His chief instrument during all those years was a general utility lawyer, Chauncey M. Depew, whose specialty was to hoodwink the public by grandiloquent exhibitions of mellifluent spread-eagle oratory, while bringing the "proper arguments" to bear upon legislators and other public officials. [Roscoe Conkling, a noted Republican politician, said of him: "Chauncey Depew? Oh, you mean the man that Vanderbilt sends to Albany every winter to say 'haw' and 'gee' to his cattle up there."] Every one who could in any way be used, or whose influence required subsidizing, was, in the phrase of the day, "taken care of." Great sums of money were distributed outright in bribes in the legislatures by lobbyists in Vanderbilt's pay. Supplementing this, an even more insidious system of bribery was carried on. Free passes for railroad travel were lavishly distributed; no politician was ever refused; newspaper and magazine editors, writers and reporters were always supplied with free transportation for the asking, thus insuring to a great measure their good will, and putting them under obligations not to criticise or expose plundering schemes or individuals. All railroad companies used this form, as well as other forms, of bribery.

It was mainly by means of the free pass system that Depew, acting for the Vanderbilts, secured not only a general immunity from newspaper criticism, but continued to have himself and them portrayed in luridly favorable lights. Depending upon the newspapers for its sources of information, the public was constantly deceived and blinded, either by the suppression of certain news, or by its being tampered with and grossly colored. This Depew continued as the wriggling tool of the Vanderbilt family for nearly half a century. Astonishing as it may seem, he managed to pass among the uninformed as a notable man; he was continuously eulogized; at one time he was boomed for the nomination for President of the United States, and in 1905 when the Vanderbilt family decided to have a direct representative in the United States Senate, they ordered the New York State Legislature, which they practically owned, to elect him to that body. It was while he was a United States Senator that the investigations, in 1905, of a committee of the New York Legislature into the affairs of certain life insurance companies revealed that Depew had long since been an advisory party to the gigantic swindles and briberies carried on by Hyde, the founder and head of the Equitable Life Assurance Society.

The career of Depew is of no interest to posterity, excepting in so far as it shows anew how the magnates were able to use intermediaries to do their underground work for them, and to put those intermediaries into the highest official positions in the country. This fact alone was responsible for their elevation to such bodies as the United States Senate, the President's Cabinet and the courts. Their long service as lobbyists or as retainers was the surest passport to high political or judicial position; their express duty was to vote or decide as their masters' interest bid them. So it was (as it is now) that men who had bribed right and left, and who had put their cunning or brains at the complete disposal of the magnates, filled Congress and the courts. These were, to a large extent, the officials by whose votes or decisions all measures of value to the working class were defeated; and reversely, by whose actions all or nearly all bills demanded by the money interests, were passed and sustained.

Here we are again forced to notice the truism thrusting itself forward so often and conspicuously; that law was essentially made by the great criminals of society, and that, thus far it has been a frightful instrument, based upon force, for legalizing theft on a large scale. By law the great criminals absolve themselves and at the same time declare drastic punishment for the petty criminals. The property obtained by theft is converted into a sacred vested institution; the men who commit the theft or their hirelings sit in high places, and pass laws surrounding the proceeds of that theft with impregnable fortifications of statutes; should any poor devil, goaded on by the exasperations of poverty, venture to help himself to even the tiniest part of that property, the severest penalty, enacted by those same plunderers, is mercilessly visited upon him.

After having bribed legislatures to legalize his enormous issue of watered stock, what was Vanderbilt's next move? The usual fraudulent one of securing exemption from taxation. He and other railroad owners sneaked through law after law by which many of their issues of stock were made non-taxable.

So now old shaggy Vanderbilt loomed up the richest magnate in the United States. His ambition was consummated; what mattered it to him that his fortune was begot in blackmail and extortion, bribery and theft? Now that he had his hundred millions he had the means to demand adulation and the semblance of respect, if not respect itself. The commercial world admired, even while it opposed, him; in his methods it saw at bottom the abler application and extension of its own, and while it felt aggrieved at its own declining importance and power, it rendered homage in the awed, reverential manner in which it viewed his huge fortune.

Over and over again, even to the point of wearisome repetition, must it be shown, both for the sake of true historical understanding and in justice to the founders of the great fortunes, that all mercantile society was permeated with fraud and subsisted by fraud. But the prevalence of this fraud did not argue its practitioners to be inherently evil. They were victims of a system inexorably certain to arouse despicable qualities. The memorable difference between the two classes was that the workers, as the sufferers, were keenly alive to the abominations of the system, while the capitalists not only insisted upon the right to benefit from its continuance, but harshly sought to repress every attempt of the workers to agitate for its modification or overthrow.

The usual method was that of subsidizing press and pulpit in certain subtle ways. By these means facts were concealed or distorted, a prejudicial state of public opinion created, and plausible grounds given for hostile interference by the State. But a far more powerful engine of repression was the coercion exercised by employers in forcing their workers to remain submissive on instant peril of losing their jobs. While, at that time, manufacturers, jobbers and shopkeepers throughout the country were rising in angry protest against the accumulation of plundering power in the hands of such men as Vanderbilt, Gould and Huntington, they were themselves exploiting and bribing on a widespread scale. Their great pose was that of a thorough commercial respectability; it was in this garb that they piously went to legislatures and demanded investigations into the rascally methods of the railroad magnates. The facts, said they, should be made public, so as to base on them appropriate legislation which would curtail the power of such autocrats. Contrasted with the baseness and hypocrisy of the trading class, Vanderbilt's qualities of brutal candor and selfishness shine out as brilliant virtues. [No observation could be truer. As a class, the manufacturers were flourishing on stolen inventions. There might be exceptions, but they were very rare. Year after year, decade after decade, the reports of the various Commissioners of Patents pointed out the indiscriminate theft of inventions by the capitalists. In previous chapters we have referred to the plundering of Whitney and Goodyear. But they were only two of a vast number of inventors similarly defrauded.

In speaking of the helplessness of inventors, J. Holt, Commissioner of Patents, wrote in his Annual Report for 1857: "The insolence and unscrupulousness of capital, subsidizing and leading on its minions in the work of pirating some valuable invention held by powerless hands, can scarcely by conceived by those not familiar with the records of such cases as I have referred to. Inventors, however gifted in other respects, are known to be confiding and thriftless; and being generally without wealth, and always without knowledge of the chicaneries of law, they too often prove but children in those rude conflicts which they are called on to endure with the stalwart fraud and cunning of the world." (U. S. Senate Documents, First Session, Thirty-fifth Congress, 1857-58, viii: 9-10). In his Annual Report for 1858, Commissioner Holt described how inventors were at the mercy of professional perjurers whom the capitalists hired to give evidence.

The bribing of Patent office officials was a common occurrence. "The attention of Congress," reported Commissioner of Patents Charles Mason in 1854, "is invited to the importance of providing some adequate means of preventing attempts to obtain patents by improper means." Several cases of "attempted bribery" had occurred within the year, stated Commissioner Mason. (Executive Documents, First Session, Thirty-third Congress, 1853-54, Vol. vii, Part I: 19-20.) Every successive Commissioner of Patents called upon Congress to pass laws for the prevention of fraud, and for the better protection of the inventor, but Congress, influenced by the manufacturers, was deaf to these appeals.]

These same manufacturers objected in the most indignant manner, as they similarly do now, to any legislative investigations of their own methods. Eager to have the practices of Vanderbilt and Gould probed into, they were acrimoniously opposed to even criticism of their factory system. For this extreme sensitiveness there was the amplest reason. The cruelties of the factory system transcended belief. In, for instance, the State of Massachusetts, vaunting itself for its progressiveness, enlightenment and culture, the textile factories were a horror beyond description. The Convention of the Boston Eight Hour League, in 1872, did not overstate when it declared of the factory system that "it employs tens of thousands of women and children eleven and twelve hours a day; owns or controls in its own selfish interest the pulpit and the press; prevents the operative classes from making themselves felt in behalf of less hours, through remorseless exercise of the power of discharge; and is rearing a population of children and youth of sickly appearance and scanty or utterly neglected schooling."...

As the factory system was in Massachusetts, so it was elsewhere. Any employee venturing to agitate for better conditions was instantly discharged; spies were at all times busy among the workers; and if a labor union were formed, the factory owners would obtain sneak emissaries into it, with orders to report on every move and disrupt the union if possible. The factory capitalists in Massachusetts, New York, Illinois and every other manufacturing State were determined to keep up their system unchanged, because it was profitable to work children eleven and a half hours a day in a temperature that in summer often reached 108 degrees and in an atmosphere certain to breed immorality; ["Certain to breed immorality." See report of Carrol D. Wright, Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, 1881. A cotton mill operative testified: "Young girls from fourteen and upward learn more wickedness in one year than they would in five out of a mill." See also the numerous recent reports of the National Child Labor Committee.] it was profitable to compel adult men and women having families to work for an average of ninety cents a day; it was profitable to avoid spending money in equipping their factories with life-saving apparatus. Hence these factory owners, forming the aristocracy of trade, savagely fought every move or law that might expose or alter those conditions; the annals of legislative proceedings are full of evidences of bribery.

Having no illusions, and being a severely practical man, Vanderbilt well knew the pretensions of this trading class; with many a cynical remark, aptly epitomizing the point, he often made sport of their assumptions. He knew (and none knew better) that they had dived deep in bribery and fraud; they were the fine gentlemen, he well recalled, who had generally obtained patents by fraud; who had so often bribed members of Congress to vote for a high tariff; the same, too, who had bribed legislatures for charters, water rights, exemptions from taxation, the right to work employees as long as, and under whatever conditions, they wanted to. This manufacturing aristocracy professed to look down upon Vanderbilt socially as a coarse sharper; and in New York a certain ruling social element, the native aristocracy, composed of old families whose wealth, originating in fraud, had become respectable by age, took no pains to conceal their opinion of him as a parvenu, and drew about their sacred persons an amusing circle of exclusiveness into the rare precincts of which he might not enter.

Vanderbilt now proceeded to buy social and religious grace as he had bought laws. The purchase of absolution has ever been a convenient and cheap method of obtaining society's condonation of theft. In medieval centuries it took a religious form; it has become transposed to a social traffic in these superior days. Let a man steal in colossal ways and then surrender a small part of it in charitable, religious and educational donations; he at once ceases being a thief and straightway becomes a noble benefactor. Vanderbilt now shed his life-long irreverence, and gave to Deems, a minister of the Presbyterian Church, as a gift, the Church of the Strangers on Mercer street, and he donated $1,000,000 for the founding of the Vanderbilt University at Nashville, Tenn. The press, the church and the educational world thereupon upon hailed him as a marvel of saintly charity and liberality.

In 1850, the operatives asked Borden for better wages and shorter hours. This was his reply: "I saw that mill built stone by stone; I saw the pickers, the carding engines, the spinning mules and the looms put into it, one after the other, and I would see every machine and stone crumble and fall to the floor again before I would accede to your wishes." Borden would not have been amiss had he added that every stone in that mill was cemented with human blood. His operatives went on a strike, stayed out ten months, suffered frightful hardships, and then were forced back to their tasks by hunger. Borden was inflexible, and so were all the other cotton mill owners. [The heroism of the cotton operatives was extraordinary. Slaves themselves, they battled to exterminate negro slavery. "The spinner's union," says McNeill, "was almost dead during the [Civil] war, as most of its members had gone to shoulder the musket and to fight... to strike the shackles from the negro. A large number were slain in battle."-"The Labor Movement": 216-217.] It was not until 1874, after many further bitterly-contested strikes, that the Masachusetts Legislature was prevailed upon to pass a ten-hour law, twenty-four years after the British Parliament had passed such an enactment.

The commercial class, high and low, was impregnated with deceit and dissimulation, cynicism, selfishness and cruelty. What were the aspirations of the working class which it was to uplift? The contrast stood out with stark distinctness. While business men were frantically sapping the labor and life out of their workers, and then tricking and cheating one another to seize the proceeds of that exploitation, the labor unions were teaching the nobility of brotherly cooperation. "Cultivate friendship among the great brotherhood of toil," was the advice of Uriah Stevens, master workman of the Knights of Labor, at the annual meeting of that organization on January 12, 1871. And he went on:

And while the toiler is thus engaged in creating the world's value, how fares his own interest and well-being? We answer, "Badly," for he has too little time, and his faculties become too much blunted by unremitting labor to analyze his condition or devise and perfect financial schemes or reformatory measures. The hours of labor are too long, and should be shortened. I recommend a universal movement to cease work at five o'clock Saturday afternoon, as a beginning. There should be a greater participation in the profits of labor by the industrious and intelligent laborer. In the present arrangements of labor and capital, the condition of the employee is simply that of wage slavery--capital dictating, labor submitting; capital superior, labor inferior.

This is an artificial and man-created condition, not God's arrangement and order; for it degrades man and ennobles mere pelf. It demeans those who live by useful labor, and, in proportion, exalts all those who eschew labor and live (no matter by what pretence or respectable cheat--for cheat it is) without productive work.

... A measure without any merit save to advance the interest of a patentee, or contractor, or railroad company, will become a law, while measures of interest to the whole people are suffered to slumber, and die at the close of the session from sheer neglect. It is known to Congressmen that these lobbyists are paid to influence legislation by the parties interested, and that dishonest and corrupt means are resorted to for the accomplishment of the object they have undertaken ... Not one interest in the country nor all other interests combined are as powerful as the railroad interest ... With a network of roads throughout the country; with a large capital at command; with an organization perfect in all its parts, controlled by a few leading spirits like Scott, Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Tracy and a dozen others, the whole strength and wealth of this corporate power can be put into operation at any moment, and Congressmen are bought and sold by it like any article of merchandise. ["Monopolies and the People:" 155-156.]