s of fictitious stock,
created purely for the benefit of inner rings, have been almost the
prevailing rule. Stock speculation and municipal corruption have
constantly gone hand in hand everywhere with the development of
the public utilities. The relation of franchise corporations to
municipalities is probably the thing which has chiefly opened the
eyes of Americans to certain glaring defects in their democratic
organization. The popular agitation which has resulted has led to great
political reforms. The one satisfaction which we can derive from such a
relation as that given above is that, after all, it is representative
of a past era in our political and economic life. No new "Metropolitan
syndicate" can ever repeat the operations of its predecessors.
Practically every State now has utility commissions which regulate
the granting of franchises, the issue of securities, the details of
construction and equipment and service. An awakened public conscience
has effectively ended the alliance between politics and franchise
corporations and the type of syndicate described in the foregoing pages
belongs as much to our American past as that rude frontier civilization
with which, after all, it had many characteristics in common.

CHAPTER VI. MAKING THE WORLD'S AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY

The Civil War in America did more than free the negro slave: it freed
the white man as well. In the Civil War agriculture, for the first time
in history, ceased to be exclusively a manual art. Up to that time the
typical agricultural laborer had been a bent figure, tending his fields
and garnering his crops with his own hands. Before the war had ended the
American farmer had assumed an erect position; the sickle and the scythe
had given way to a strange red chariot, which, with practically no
expenditure of human labor, easily did the work of a dozen men. Many
as have been America's contributions to civilization, hardly any have
exerted greater influence in promoting human welfare than her gift
of agricultural machinery. It seems astounding that, until McCormick
invented his reaper, in 1831, agricultural methods, in both the New and
the Old World, differed little from those that had prevailed in the days
of the Babylonians. The New England farmer sowed his fields and reaped
his crops with almost identically the same instruments as those which
had been used by the Roman farmer in the time of the Gracchi. Only a
comparatively few used the scythe;