eeing the day when their business would
become a great railroad monopoly. The two hundred companies that were
making mowers and reapers, seventy-five of them located in New York
State, had formed no mental picture of the future International
Harvester Company. One of our first large industrial combinations was
that which in the early seventies absorbed the manufacturers of salt;
yet the close of the Civil War found fifty competing companies making
salt in the Saginaw Valley of Michigan. In the same State, about fifty
distinct ownerships controlled the copper mines, while in Nevada the
Comstock Lode had more than one hundred proprietors. The modern trust
movement has now absorbed even our lumber and mineral lands, but in 1865
these rich resources were parceled out among a multiplicity of owners:
No business has offered greater opportunities to the modern promoter of
combinations than our street railways. In 1865 most of our large cities
had their leisurely horse-car systems, yet practically every avenue had
its independent line. New York had thirty separate companies engaged
in the business of local transportation. Indeed the Civil War period
developed only one corporation that could be described as a "trust"
in the modern sense. This was the Western Union Telegraph Company.
Incredible as it may seem, more than fifty companies, ten years before
the Civil War, were engaged in the business of transmitting telegraphic
messages. These companies had built their telegraph lines precisely as
the railroads had laid their tracks; that is, independent lines were
constructed connecting two given points. It was inevitable, of course,
that all these scattered lines should come under a single control, for
the public convenience could not be served otherwise. This combination
was effected a few years before the War, when the Western Union
Telegraph Company, after a long and fierce contest, succeeded in
absorbing all its competitors. Similar forces were bringing together
certain continuous lines of railways, but the creation of huge trunk
systems had not yet taken place. How far our industrial era is removed
from that of fifty years ago is apparent when we recall that the
proposed capitalization of $15,000,000, caused by the merging of the
Boston and Worcester and the Western railroads, was widely denounced as
"monstrous" and as a corrupting force that would destroy our Republican
institutions. Naturally this small-scale ownership was ref