ween
unregulated possession of this kind of property and all the higher
welfare of the community. If we add to the railway the common city
monopolies of lighting and transportation; if we add industries in iron
and steel, much of our mining, oil, and forest exploitation, all of
which, in connection with railways, take on inevitably the form of
monopoly, we have the whole buccaneer-group that has done upon our
politics the deadly work, which we know so well that its retelling is a
thing to avoid from very weariness.

Though a dozen other cities would serve as well, look for a moment at
the monopoly of the New York street-railways. A people, careless and
ignorant of their own interests, so far give away the rights in their
streets, that a few men get them into their possession. With the grip
once fast upon this power, it becomes not a machinery primarily to serve
the people: primarily it becomes an enginery to filch vast unearned
increments from the public. It becomes a device for gambling, with the
dice so heavily loaded in your favor that you cannot lose. You change
power from one kind to another; you merge one line with another or with
the whole; you create holding companies; and at every change you
recapitalize. Your million dollars is turned into five or ten or twenty
millions, in order that multiplied dividends taken from the public may
drop into private pockets. Every bit of bookkeeping meant for the public
eye is a mass of jugglery. If you are frightened by the challenge of an
indignant public, the most important records are destroyed. Surplus
funds belonging to the stockholders are freely loaned to personal
friends or put to private speculative ventures.

This shell-game has gone on decade after decade, so gayly that it seems
as if it were a delight to the American people to have their pockets
picked. And yet, let us say it over and over again, the pocket-picking
is not the worst of it. That the people's money should be used to
debauch their own chosen representatives in city and state legislatures
is the uttermost evil. Part and parcel of the uttermost evil is the
resulting suspicion and distrust that eat their way deep through the
masses of the wage-earning world. Not to mention their own trade papers,
or the socialistic sheets with the scandals of high and low finance,
wage-earners have only to read the capitalistic sheets, presidential
messages, and summarized reports from scores of legislative committees,