financial manager, with big banking firms of Philadelphia
and New York; (3) Harriman, with Frick for counsel and Odell
as political lieutenant, controlling the central
continental, Southwestern and Southern Pacific Coast lines
of transportation; (4) the Gould family railway interests;
and (5) Moore, Reid, and Leeds, known as the "Rock Island
crowd." These strong oligarchs arose out of the conflict of
competition and travelled the inevitable road toward
combination.

"Let me point out the power of but one of them, the railroad group. It
employs forty thousand lawyers to defeat the people in the courts. It
issues countless thousands of free passes to judges, bankers, editors,
ministers, university men, members of state legislatures, and of
Congress. It maintains luxurious lobbies* at every state capital, and
at the national capital; and in all the cities and towns of the land
it employs an immense army of pettifoggers and small politicians whose
business is to attend primaries, pack conventions, get on juries, bribe
judges, and in every way to work for its interests.**

* Lobby--a peculiar institution for bribing, bulldozing, and
corrupting the legislators who were supposed to represent
the people's interests.

** A decade before this speech of Everhard's, the New York
Board of Trade issued a report from which the following is
quoted: "The railroads control absolutely the legislatures
of a majority of the states of the Union; they make and
unmake United States Senators, congressmen, and governors,
and are practically dictators of the governmental policy of
the United States."

"Gentlemen, I have merely sketched the power of one of the seven groups
that constitute the brain of the Plutocracy.* Your twenty-four billions
of wealth does not give you twenty-five cents' worth of governmental
power. It is an empty shell, and soon even the empty shell will be taken
away from you. The Plutocracy has all power in its hands to-day. It
to-day makes the laws, for it owns the Senate, Congress, the courts, and
the state legislatures. And not only that. Behind law must be force to
execute the law. To-day the Plutocracy makes the law, and to enforce the
law it has at its beck and call the, police, the army, the navy, and,
lastly, the militia, which is you, and me, and all of us."

* Rockefeller began as a member of the proletariat, and