flow of population was westward, and the West
called for communication with the East. The Union Pacific and Central
Pacific railways, the pioneer transcontinental lines, fostered on
generous grants of land, were the tokens of the new transportation
movement. Railroads were pushing forward everywhere with unheard-of
rapidity. Short lines were being merged into far-reaching systems.
In the early seventies the Pennsylvania system was organized and the
Vanderbilts acquired control of lines as far west as Chicago. Soon
the Baltimore and Ohio system extended its empire of trade to the
Mississippi. Half a dozen ambitious trans-Mississippi systems,
connecting with four new transcontinental projects, were put into
operation.

Prosperity is always the opportunity of the politician. What is of
greatest significance to the student of politics is that prosperity at
this time was organized on a new basis. Before the war business had been
conducted largely by individuals or partnerships. The unit was small;
the amount of capital needed was limited. But now the unit was expanding
so rapidly, the need for capital was so lavish, the empire of trade so
extensive, that a new mechanism of ownership was necessary. This device,
of course, was the corporation. It had, indeed, existed as a trading
unit for many years. But the corporation before 1860 was comparatively
small and was generally based upon charters granted by special act of
the legislature.

No other event has had so practical a bearing on our politics and our
economic and social life as the advent of the corporate device for
owning and manipulating private business. For it links the omnipotence
of the State to the limitations of private ownership; it thrusts
the interests of private business into every legislature that grants
charters or passes regulating acts; it diminishes, on the other hand,
that stimulus to honesty and correct dealing which a private individual
discerns to be his greatest asset in trade, for it replaces individual
responsibility with group responsibility and scatters ownership among so
large a number of persons that sinister manipulation is possible.

But if the private corporation, through its interest in broad charter
privileges and liberal corporation laws and its devotion to the tariff
and to conservative financial policies, found it convenient to do
business with the politician and his organization, the quasi-public
corporations, especially the steam r