a replication to the array, once for all. Especially when the volume impresses us at every paragraph as having been compiled by a gentleman who not only has never been engaged in the management of railways, operatively or financially, but has never discovered, in all the immense delicacy of mechanism which moves 8,778,581,061 of people one mile, and billions of dollars' worth of treasure in every direction across and along a continent in a single year, and supports a property representing $7,676,399,054 of securities, a single point for his admiration or even for his approval.

Archimedes had the world for a load and natural science for a lever; but even Archimedes was obliged to sigh for a place whereon to plant his fulcrum. It appears to me that, in this laborious work of five hundred closely printed octavo pages, what Mr. Hud son lacks most of all is a standpoint. He has a load, he has a grievance for a lever, but, since he can not himself float in space, he makes no impression on what he claims to be the burden to be moved. Mr. Hudson's want of standpoint is prominent at his very outset in his very title-page. He calls his book "The Railways and the Republic," thus antagonizing his two terms. But the grouping is vicious, to begin with; since railroads, whether regarded as legal entities or as companies of individuals, are as much part and parcel of the republic as is Mr. Hudson himself. Starting upon this false major premise, Mr. Hudson proceeds in the first of his eleven chapters to give us the indictment, the remaining ten to be the counts of the particulars.

THE title given to this indictment, "The Problem of Railway Domination," is again illicit. Where is the "domination" to be eliminated? Frankly admitting that the present writer believes that railways belong to the persons whose money has built or pur

chased them, and that their quasi-public character is justified and satisfied by their honest performance, by the best methods that applied science up to date has furnished, of the duties of public transportation, he purposes from this standpoint to examine: first, Mr. Hudson's indictment as a whole, passing thereafter-as far as the limits of a single volume will allow-to the particulars exhibited.

According to Mr. Hudson, the railways of the United States either "dominate " at present, or propose sooner or later to "dominate," the republic. How? By being "gigantic monopolists," says Mr. Hudson. And how do they become gigantic monopolists? By being gigantic corporations, controlled by men of altogether too enormous private fortunes. Now, we have always known that a railway was a corporation, and that some of our railways might fairly be called "gigantic." But there is not one of these "gigantic" corporations which is, in any sense of the term known to dictionaries at least, a monopoly. To be exactly all-fours with the lexicographers, the only railways in the Union which are monopolies are countable on the fingers of one hand, and must be as insignificant in extent, capitalization, importance of terminals and every other characteristic, as they are in number. Everybody knows that a shipper or traveler from New York to any point in the United States has an abundant choice of routes before him. Whether his objective be Buffalo, New Orleans, or San Francisco, or any city or town large enough to make a dot on the map, or any one of the ten thousand points reachable from every one of these, there are certainly half a dozen lines of railway at his option; and if there are two points in the United States between which there is but one means of transportation, it is because the points themselves are of such exceedingly minor importance that a second means has entirely failed to be a temptation to local capitalists. I once happened upon a railroad on the top of the Alleghany Mountains, five miles in length, called the Wilcox and BurningWell Railroad, running between a tannery and a saw-mill, whichas there was no other means of going from one to the other except by taking an axe and a compass and tempting the aboriginal

forest-might, I think, be fairly called a monopoly, especially since the owner of the railroad was also the owner of both the terminal tannery and the terminal saw-mill. But the great majority of American railways are, just now, competitors rather than monopolists, and, if gigantic at all, are gigantic competitors. It is to be admitted, of course, that to construct, maintain, and operate a "gigantic" railway, gigantic corporations may not be

unnecessary.

Now, railways "dominate," says Mr. Hudson, by being these gigantic corporations against which units have no chance. But just as capital is the storage of labor, so a corporation is the aggregate of units, and if units can combine to "dominate "other and uncombined units, why can not these other units combine to resist the domination? Mr. Hudson does not recognize such a question, suggests no device by which the unit unassisted by capital can equal in strength the unit when so assisted, nor any reason why the units incorporated for transportation purposes should not compete for the transportation business of the units not incorporated for transportation purposes. This word "competition," however, is no favorite of Mr. Hudson's. He immensely prefers "domination": and properly so, too, since in the employment of the latter word lie not only his premises, but the conclusions at which he assumes to arrive. The railways, concreted, "dominate " the republic (that is to say, all the United States except the railways), and therefore, since they "dominate" by doing the transportation business of those not in that business, the only safety is to reverse the situation, so that the units not incorporated for transportation purposes should hereafter dominate the units who are so incorporated. In other words: Let our railroads, by all means, be run by men who do not understand railroading, and let those who do understand the running of railroads step down and out at once.

But why should those individually concerned in railway management step down and out? Why, says Mr. Hudson, because several of them have accumulated enormous fortunes; fortunes fabulous, even when compared with all the other private fortunes in

the world. But whence come these ten or a dozen (if so many) vast fortunes? Why, says Mr. Hudson, with admirable circumferentiality, from the domination of railways. Clearly we must get this kernel out of Mr. Hudson's crop if we are to proceed with him any further: and to dispose of it may require a moment or two of our attention.

The greatest of powers, undoubtedly, is the human brain; and, so long as it is the instinct of man to scheme for his own aggrandizement, certainly the greatest brain will scheme to the greatest profit to himself. A dozen men in the United States have been able to amass, from management (or, if the word is preferred, manipulation) of the securities of the railway systems of the country, the largest single fortunes known to history: not in land, in interests in estimated wealth, but in actual comfortable, convertible cash, representing no manual labor of their own, no commensurate investment of capital, and no proportional benefit to the race. But, because Mr. Hudson is virtuous, are there to be no more cakes and ale ? Because Mr. Gould is very rich, are there to be no more railway companies? Because these dozen fortunes are beyond any heretofore conceived relation of reward for personal industry, is the material by manipulation of the securities of which they have been accumulated, noxious, bad in itself, and dangerous to the common weal? These fortunes are, for our present purpose, the pure result of brain-labor, the rewards of pure thought. Let us leave out of the reckoning whether they are honest or dishonest fortunes; or, if Mr. Hudson prefers, let us concede them to be dishonest. The fact, the only fact, necessary to the discussion of his own questions on his own ground is that they have been accumulated by the purchase, manipulation, and operation of railways. The people make the laws, not the railroads. To argue that railroads, quoad railroads, are hateful to public policy, dangerous to the public peace, threatening to public morals, and destined in time to destroy the commonwealth, as private luxury once destroyed old Rome, seems to me the simple fallacy which logicians call an "undistributed middle." As well condemn any other thing because at some time some

thing of its species has been manipulated to a personal and exorbitant profit. Banish corn, wheat, or coal, because great "corners" have been planned in those staples, and hundreds of thousands of dealers obliged to pay more than they ought to have paid, when a few schemers, who had schemed for months, had suddenly sprung upon these unsuspecting gentlemen their longperfected plans!

Shakespeare makes one of his characters put the question, "How do men live?" and another answers it: "Marry, as the fishes in the sea, the big ones eat up the little ones." The struggle for existence which our brute ancestors carried on with teeth and claws and fangs, we still perpetuate with interlocked and grappling brains. They strove and tore and trampled each other for the food their bellies craved, in specie; we fight for values instead. But the result is the same: the strongest brain, as once the strongest limb, wins. And when, as within the last halfcentury right here in the United States, in what is scarcely more than the close of the first half-century of the railroad, a few phenomenal brains have amassed more of these values than their share, more than they can consume with their own personal wants —while I admit that the problem looks serious to those whose brains have not taken part in the struggle-the wrong seems to me one for which Nature, not art or science or schools, is at present mostly responsible, just as much as she is responsible for the lion that rends the ox, or the fox that pillages the farm-yard. The United States of America does not make treaties with individuals : and yet the treaty between the United States and the kingdom of Hawaii is, or was once, practically for the single benefit of one man. Why? Because there happens to be but one article of export from Hawaii to the United States; and because that one product happens, or happened, to be controlled by the brains and capital of one man. So this anomaly-this wrong, we suppose Mr. Hudson would call it-is to be charged to the crime of having brains, or to the domination of (not railways this time, but) sugar! Perhaps the situation can be made very clear to Mr. Hudson by a quotation from himself: