a process. Let Senator Cullom, for example, try and establish à trade-centre, and he will speedily recognize the impossibility of it. And did Senator Cullom try, it would not be the first attempt. There are plenty of platted cities and towns to-day in the United States which have been laid out to make grass grow in the streets of actual cities in whose favor Nature and geography long ago decreed that they should be, in deed and in truth, trade-centres; and the platters, their successors and assigns, yet feel the hiatus made in their bank-accounts by payment for the costly honor of making valuable suggestions to the attraction of gravitation. I need not, I suppose, refer, for example, to the plethora of "cities" and "city sites," whose prospects the vast dockage and trade territory of Chicago has superseded. But the force, the unwritten law, that has twice built the city of Chicago within the memory of men just entering middle age, was not devised by human brains. Perhaps a better answer to Senator Cullom's remarkable proposition about "trade-centres" could not be devised than a brief tracing of the operations of this law in this very building and rebuilding of a geographical trade-centre of this continent. And if it shall be said "even if human laws did not build Chicago, a lack of exact knowledge of this operation and an interstate jealousy of their inevitable result contributed to the building," yet that ignorance and jealousy, it may be replied, were a part of the result of the working of the law, rather than of the process by which it worked. No human foresight placed Lake Michigan where it is. But human foresight did perceive that somewhere near its foot a great commercial centre must some day arise. Various points were selected by shrewd pioneers; and if the reader will take down his map he will find them still indicated upon it-Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha, Waukegan, and Michigan City were perhaps the most promising of these (the latter especially, since here was the very foot of the great trunk or tongue of navigable water which penetrated from the north into the rich central ridge of the nation, along which its integral artery of inland communication must run, and from whose head great navigable wings were spreading east and west). Yet, while all these points were selected, somehow, the swamp where Chicago now lies was carefully avoided. But it seems those natural causes which we call laws of trade were in operation; the heavy settlement of the Ohio Valley sought its outlet on the lakes, and somehow the first practical expression of that search-a railroad-capped, not Milwaukee, Racine, or Kenosha, but the swamp where rose Chicago. And now occurred a wonderful thing. The jealousy of those lakeports which the laws of trade had passed aside in favor of Chicago began to operate. Each of these lake-ports saw the increasing prosperity of Chicago, and each and every one of them fell into the very error which Senator Cullom cherishes to-day. In almost his exact language each one said to itself-You people who are rushing to Chicago to build your docks and elevators are poor deluded creatures, who "have no means of knowing what are the natural channels of traffic." Those railroads are fooling you. Don't go to Chicago. Here at Racine, at Kenosha, at Milwaukee, is the place for your capital. Here is where the great development is to be. (There was no Interstate Commerce law then, but here was its spirit, and its root was, as perhaps a generation later, jealousy pure and simple). But somehow the capital still poured into Chicago; its docks and elevators multiplied. What was the next step of the jilted towns? Each went to work; each for itself built a railroad of its own, mortgaging the property of its citizens, issuing its bonds, pledging its credit, and multiplying its taxes to pay for it. What was the result? Simply that the wheat and corn and produce which had come to each of these ports to be loaded into ships-thereby making the trade on which the town lived and fattened in moderate prosperity-now having a cheaper transit to a larger and therefore better market, went where?-went to Chicago! In other words, these cities had destroyed themselves-impoverished not only their citizens, but loaded their successors with debt-not to increase their own prosperity, but that of hated Chicago! They had tried to fight the inexorable laws of trade and of trade-centres, and had been ruined in the attempt. The West is not free to-day from the effects of this lake-side effort to guide and assist the natural laws of trade. Money is yet being paid annually into New York trust companies in the vicinity of Wall Street by these same small lake cities (many of which by the prevailing of better counsels have become manufacturing towns of wealth and importance), as their yet uncompleted penance for believing in their own wisdom as against the unwritten statutes of the univrese; and if Senator Cullom sincerely believes that trade-centers can be created by human foresight, he can-by following up the map in the direction I have indicated-find many students in the hard school of experience willing to enlighten him. It has been the bulk of criticism against the Interstate Commerce law, not that it was unconstitutional, but that it was an attempt to equalize by statute what Nature and cosmic forces has rendered unequal; that it was Geography and not the railways which had established sea-ports and lake ports and river-ports; and that -since the sea, the lakes, and rivers did not as a rule charge more for a short than for a long haul-it was putting the statutebook of the United States into the position of a bull warning off comets, to give a railroad a franchise to live with one hand, and with the other to brandish a sword over it, if-in operating its franchise-it compete with its competitors! But the bottom objection on the part of the people to the railway companies which has produced the Interstate Commerce law, lies unconsciously far deeper than that. It lies in the fact that the laws of trade invariably select the same points for trade-centres that Nature herself has first selected. New York, Boston, Baltimore, New Orleans, San Francisco were trade-centres before railroads were devised. When a trade-centre was wanted on Lake Michigan, Chicago was selected, not by men, but by the force of natural laws. What the capitalists called a "swamp," and so avoided, was really a business plain. Sand drifted in, and built a bar before Michigan City; at certain other lake points the bluff, crumbling constantly into the lake, imperiled the harbors; other natural causes worked away at others. The cosmic forces were at work in favor of Chicago, and Chicago was elected trade-centre of the majestic West. In other words, it is simply because it can not dispense with the discriminations of Nature that the people are disappointed with the railway as an institution, and so propose to vent their disappointment by enacting laws bristling with penalties, but nowhere promising them protection; putting their affairs into the hands of non-experts, and calling them to penal and paternal account for every breath they draw. If Senator Cullom seriously believes that the railroads have created the trade-centres of this continent arbitrarily, let him tell us why every railroad company in the country is willing to spend millions of dollars in order to get into such cities as New York and Chicago? Could a railroad create a trade-centre as easily as Senator Cullom imagines, it would certainly come cheaper to that company to make a trade-centre of their own than to buy their way against every known legal, commercial, political, and geographical obstacle-into one already established. The Pennsylvania Railroad Company was built by Philadelphia capital; certainly it did not desire to discriminate against Philadelphia. If railroads can make trade-centres where they like why did not the Pennsylvania Railroad create a trade-centre for itself in its own City of Brotherly Love? The Lehigh Valley Railroad Company is a loyal Pennsylvania corporation, and its owners are natives there and to the manner born. Why did not the Lehigh Valley Railroad Company make for itself trade-centres on its own line, where land was cheap, instead of crowding into New York City at one end and into Buffalo at the other, at enormous cost? The Grand Trunk Railway is a British institution built to foster the interests of Great Britain's greatest colony, at the direct expense of its greatest commercial rival in the world's family of nations-the United States; why does not the Grand Trunk road make for itself commercial centres at Montreal or Toronto or Hamilton or Ottawa or Windsor? Why has it spent millions of good honest British gold in buying its way into Chicago at one end and Boston at the other? If, the moment railways were organized, they set the laws of Nature and of man alike at defiance, and began "to divert trade from its natural channels into artificial ones at the expense of less favored localities," as Senator Cullom boldly charges, why is the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, owned in Baltimore, and largely by that city itself-a corporate pet of the State whose securities are a legal investment for trust funds -expending its earnings and surplus like water to parallel the Pennsylvania in a territory requiring massive construction, and fighting not only that corporation, but the State of New Jersey, in order to get into the city of New York at one end, as it has succeeded in getting into Chicago at the other? Why not save your millions, gentlemen managers of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company, and build a few trade-centres for yourselves at small expense? Senator Cullom says it is simplicity itself to make an artificial trade-centre; that railways have not only had no difficulty in doing it, but have actually and tortuously thereby diverted trade from natural trade-centres to the artificial ones created by themselves. Why not, then, scatter as many tradecentres as your business requires along the line of your railroad, and grow opulent beyond the dreams of avarice by doing business between them, with no possible competition to intrude and make you afraid? Seriously, is it not common information on the subject that the laws of trade are as inexorable as those of gravitation, and that it is simply impossible for human ingenuity to create a trade-centre or to destroy one already made by Nature? Yea, and, moreover, that not only are human beings unable to shift the trade-centre, but they can not even alter the local commercial centres of a trade-centre. When Chicago was wiped out by conflagration it occurred at once to certain clever owners of real estate in the neighborhood of the heart of the city-within the city lines, and of easy communication therewith-that their opportunity had arisen. Instead of buying land in the old business centres at ten thousand dollars a foot, and spending a reasonable fortune in carting away debris before beginning to erect new walls let us go to work at once and build on our own lands, they said; the trade of this vast metropolis can not wait, it will come and transact itself on our premises as soon as completed. What |