The Political Economy of Seventy-Three Million Dollars

I.

FOUR years ago it was proposed to expel political economy from its place in the course of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, on the ground that it had failed to make good its scientific pretensions. In the speeches at the dinner given, in 1876, by the Cobden Club, to celebrate the centenary of the Wealth of Nations, and in the eager discussion about political economy which followed in the English reviews, there was unmistakable despondency in the tone of the economists. Bagehot owns that political economy lies rather dead in the public: mind, and confesses that it deals not with real men, but imaginary ones. Jevons sees signs of the disruption of the orthodox school. Bonamy Price, of Oxford, declares its scientific method to be a mistake. To Cairnes one feature is prominent in all debate for the settlement of the Irish land question, — “ a profound distrust of political economy.” Harriet Martineau won no small part of her fame by popularizing the truths of political economy in her celebrated tales; but later in life, in her Autobiography, she tells the world that had so eagerly swallowed her sweetened doses of supply and demand that what she had at first taken to be a science she had come to regard as no science at all. A great school of Continental students of the welfare of man in society has long rejected the dominant ideas and methods of what in England and America is called orthodox political economy; orthodox, probably, because no two of its expounders agree. The most philosophic mind that England has produced in this generation, capable of a few great generalizations, and capable of not making little ones, — Sir Henry Maine, — calls for a new political economy, which shall use the methods that have been so fruitful in the historical study of early human institutions. In these studies, price, rent, the market, property, competition, and freedom of contract are shown to have arisen in places and ways never even dreamed of by the deductive economist. Comte strenuously denied that political economy was a science, and he and his followers thought it immoral to waste good lives in elaborating hypotheses assuming the supremacy of self-interest and competition, when the crying want of mankind is to destroy that supremacy. The study makes little headway in our colleges. I asked a college boy what he and his classmates thought of it. “ All the bright fellows,” he said, “ think it’s scrubby ; but all the dull ones believe it’s a great thing.” And Professor Dunbar, of the chair of political economy of Harvard, said, in 1876, that for one hundred years the United States had done nothing toward developing its theory. Our high thinkers, like Ruskin, Carlyle, and Emerson, have refused from the first to acknowledge its authority. According to Ruskin, nothing has ever been so disgraceful to human intellect as the acceptance among us of the common doctrines of political economy as a science. He holds that the economic principles taught to our multitudes, so far as accepted, lead straight to national destruction ; that they are like a science of gymnastics which assumes that the human being is all skeleton, and that they found an ossifiant theory of human progress on the negation of a soul. Emerson says, nobly and simply, The best political economy is the care and culture of men. Our great statesmen do not look on this science, which is supposed to be specially theirs, with more favor than the moralists. Gladstone said, at the Adam Smith dinner, that not much remained for political economy to do, except in regard to the currency ; and yet so much has this science done to prevent man from understanding what man invented, that Gladstone has elsewhere declared that of all studies the currency question is most provocative of insanity. Bismarck told an American member of Congress, in 1879, speaking of the German monetary reform of 1873, “We listened to an eminent economist, and we now see that we have put only plain water into our soup - boiler.” No one has more happily anticipated the drift of recent criticism than Daniel Webster, who wrote to a friend in a letter lately published, —

“ For my part, though I like the investigation of particular questions, I give up what is called the science of political economy. There is no such science. There are no rules on these subjects so fixed and invariable that their aggregate constitutes a science. I have recently run over twenty volumes from Adam Smith to Professor Dew, and if from the whole I were to pick out with one hand all mere truisms, and with the other all doubtful propositions, little would be left.”

And yet this is the science the study of which Cobden declared to be the highest exercise of the human mind, and which drew from Buckle, in the History of Civilization which has already become an antique though not a classic, his often-quoted tribute to the Wealth of Nations.

Never more than now have we needed such a help as this political economy has pretended to be. The reaction against it comes at a time when the body of the people are growing uneasy at the peril of a position between workingmen who combine and capitalists who consolidate. Rings and bosses are rising to the top in the evolution of industry as in that of politics. New facts, like the union in one person of the common carrier and the owner of the highway, are baffling our statesmen. A few individuals are becoming rich enough to control almost all the great markets, including the legislatures. We feel ourselves caught in the whirl of new forces, and flung forward every day a step farther into a future dim with the portents of struggle between Titans reared on steam, electricity, and credit. It is an unfortunate moment for the break-down of the science that claimed to be able to reconcile self-interest with the harmony of interests.

Adam Smith modestly termed his great book An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The political economy of his successors is taught, in the universities of England and most of the colleges of this country, not as an investigation to be pursued in the laboratory of facts, but as a body of settled truths, revealed by teachers, and to be applied as a universal solvent. It is what nothing can be, — an apostolic science. Mill’s language shows that he regards history as an arsenal from which to draw facts to reinforce his economic theories, not as a record in which the development of society may be observed, and its laws discovered by the methods that have given such practical and brilliant results in the hands of Maine, Von Maurer, Roscher, Nasse, De Laveleye, and Leslie. Mill says at the beginning of his Political Economy that the science is based on assumptions, and that its conclusions are only hypothetical. Senior, of Oxford, states that it depends more on reasoning than on observation, and that its principal difficulty consists not in the ascertainment of its facts, but the use of its terms. Its facts according to him may be stated in a very few sentences, and indeed in a very few words. Precisely the same view is taken by Professor Sumner, of Yale College. In a recent address in Brooklyn, on Revenue Reform, he said, “ Unfortunately the economist can’t create facts, and history furnishes him but few. Consequently, hypotheses have to be used.” It is worth noticing that while the abstract economists are suffering for facts, the latest parliamentary commission sitting in England to investigate one of the greatest economic conundrums of modern society — the relations of railroads to other business and the state — have been actually overwhelmed with facts. The political economy of the French Revolution and the Code Napoleon has still to be written; and it will be full of facts. A generation of economists can find employment in Maine’s hint that they study the aberrations, accidents, friction, of political economy. Lieber says history moves along a rising spiral; let some economist determine the curve and velocity with which the modern world is apparently moving back to an era of custom and combination, that is, monopoly instead of competition. A work on money is needed that shall generalize its multitudinous facts from wampum to confidence in terms intelligible to common people, business men, other economists — and the author. The fact is, these hypothetical economists have done for the industrial descent of man what Haeckel and his evolutionists have done for the theory of his physical descent. They have substituted assumption and dogma for a Darwinian patience in accumulating facts and reserve in generalization. They deserve the same rebuke that Virchow administered to Haeckel at the Munich meeting, a few years ago. Virchow pointed out that in medicine, the only science which has a continuous history of three thousand years, the stream of dogmatism has been continually narrowing; warned Haeckel that he and his school were treating as a dogma proved that which was only a problem to be investigated ; and uttered these wise words, which should be branded into the mental cuticle of every disciple of the closet economists : We who support science, we who live in science, are all the more called upon to abstain from carrying into the heads of men, and most of all into the heads of teachers, that which we only suppose.

Though Mill’s culture knew these limitations of the method he followed, his mind did not; at least, the James Mill side of his mind did not. The mental habit forced on him by his father, who, like a civilized Flat-Head Indian, put his little four-year-old boy’s round head into a square frame, was too strong to be overcome. John Stuart Mill rebuked the economists for paying too much attention to the hypothesis of competition, but persisted himself in the attempt to discover truth by the processes of assumption, to the exclusion of what Roscher calls the physiological method.

In abstract political economy, wealth is the subject, desire of wealth the motive, competition the regulator, supply and demand the law, freedom of contract the condition, and equalization of rent, wages, other prices, and profits the result. If the critic looks with distrust on a science of human conduct founded on assumptions, and doubts the stability of a structure reared with syllogistic brick on imaginary foundations, to what a dead stop must he come before the unscientific vagueness of this term " wealth.” Mill says wealth consists of all useful and agreeable objects which have exchangeable value. Accept this definition, and how vast the territory it covers. It reaches from the individual to the nation, from the family to the stock exchange, where the economist most nearly finds his ideal. What man wants of man varies with countless contingencies, from those of sympathy down. Adam Smith, the greatest expositor of the virtue of self-interest that ever lived, his editor, Thorold Rogers, tells us, impaired his fortune by his benevolence. His greatest disciple, Cobden, spent his life and his private means to give the poor cheap bread. Ideals of life determine whether iron shall be turned into artillery to teach Hindoos free trade at the cannon’s mouth, or into plowshares for American homesteads. The buccaneer looked for gold, and is poor; the Puritan sought freedom, and is rich. Fashion kills the manufacture of lustrous woolen dress stuffs. Government fixes whether land shall descend by the land law of the people, as in France, or by the land law of the nobles, as in England. Custom says that grocers may, but that doctors and plumbers shall not, undersell each other. According to the age, society will build cathedrals or railroads. Sex hedges one half the world with the gravest physiological and social limitations. If you are a Calvinist, free will must have something to say about your desire of wealth. This science of wealth is the science of man — and woman. Every note of the human voice, whether of preacher or pirate, mother or Magdalen, must be heard in the formulas of wealth. The world of wealth is the world of soul, over-soul, and under-soul; and yet its philosophers attempt to lay down its facts and terms in one sentence, or, as Senior says, in a very few words, and Sumner has to make hypotheses.

A generalization of all objects that have color would be as definite and useful as one of all objects that have exchangeability. Wealth is what men desire of each other ; hence, the desire of wealth is the desire of what men desire. This is not a play on words, but is the exposure, in the language of real life, of the barrenness of the terms of the economists. They who cannot draw out leviathan with a hook have sought to catch the world of man in an abstraction, and have failed, because anything that would be true of so much must be a truism.

This kind of political economy has its counterpart in the theory of physical science, which attempts to explain matter on the assumption that it consists of atoms, absolutely equal and homogeneous. The equality of atoms in science, the equality of man in the state of nature, and the equality of profits in political economy are three faces — physical, social, and industrial — of one fallacy. These theories may have served a purpose as systems of mnemonics or propaganda, but they have had their day.

All the machinery of the abstract political economist is driven by the force of competition. “ Only through competition,” says Mill, “has political economy any pretensions to the character of a science. . . . Assume competition to be the exclusive regulator of rents, wages, profits, and prices, and principles of broad generality and scientific precision may be laid down, according to which they will be regulated. . . . As an abstract or hypothetical science, political economy cannot do anything more.” The critic of this method wants a political economy that will disclose the actual, not the hypothetical, regulators of prices, wages, rents, and profits. By excluding all forces but those of competition, these economists shut themselves out from the consideration of the gravest problems of the day, which are questions of combination, and not of competition. On the other hand, their principle of competition does not fit the questions which they choose to attack. Their competition equalizes values with the cost of production, leveling the wages of laborers down to the cost of subsistence, and leveling the rent of landlords up to all the produce of the farm above the maintenance of the tenant. As to the facts of the theory, take an extensive view. The death of Babylon, the decay of Venice, the maturity of London, the growth of New York, and the rise of Chicago are not phenomena of equalization, but of inequalization, — tide-marks of a westward flood and ebb. Take a narrower range. McCulloch says that the principles of political economy and the forces of modern industry have obliterated the differences in the wages of British labor noticed by Adam Smith. Cliffe Leslie shows by the logic of facts that steam, new gold, and railroads have created new centres of wealth and industry, and have made the modern disparities of English wages greater than they were in the time of Adam Smith. The same forces that are inequalizing wages are inequalizing profits. He would be a bold man who could assert that there had been a process of equalization in the political economy of New England since the days when the Pilgrim Fathers, unconsciously reproducing the earliest ideas of the race, founded a society on the principle of the ancient village community. Competition shifts taxation, theoretically, upon consumers, but one of the strongest lobbies in Washington, during the recent session, was kept there by the proprietors of patent medicines, to procure the repeal of the stamp tax they pay. At a time when a hundred wedding-rings were pawned in one town in a single week for money to buy bread with, as Cobden tells us, English landlords were proving by Ricardo’s theory of competition that a tax on corn could not fall on the laborer. By the same theory Mill taught the laborers that to have large families was as wicked as to be guilty of habitual drunkenness, because wages would go down if population went up. But, as a matter of fact, population and wages have been rising together in England for many years. Their theory of rent is the achievement of which the English economists are most proud. It justifies the landlord in taking all the produce of the soil above the cost of subsistence. If the farmer tried to keep more for his share, competition, the force which, according to Mill, equalizes the profits of occupations, would take it away from him. The landlords of England, in the words of the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, are starving the workers of their country to save their rents. Our faith that the theories of competition explain the facts of this kind of rent is shaken by the discovery that it appeared in East Indian political economy, where competition was unknown. The Mohammedan emperors of Delhi, the Mahratta princes, the Sikhs of the Punjab, different in many other things, were alike, Maine says, in this, that they took so much of the produce of the soil as to leave the cultivators little more than the means of bare subsistence. Cobden asserted that the English agricultural laborers were not one whit higher, intellectually, than in the days of their Saxon forefathers. Competition leaves some awkward gaps of inequality in the very heart of merrie old England. The Irish land courts have reduced rents by an average of eighteen to thirty per cent. Even Ricardo would have to admit that a sovereignty was working through the land courts that overtopped competition. American rent is generally fixed by custom at one third the produce of the farm. Belgian rent and French rent, where they exist, have their peculiarities. English rent is an historical product, whose determining forces have been of all kinds, from conquest to American competition. Among these forces are such legislation and lack of legislation in the interest of a dominant class as permit the landlords to continue paying taxes on land on the valuation of 1692, while their tenants and laborers are taxed on the value to-day of what they consume. Among these forces, too, must be counted the predisposition against change which keeps the British farmer growing wheat in the very shadow of London smoke, while the Belgian and French farmers supply the metropolis with its fresh vegetables. Rent, Mill asserts, is the result of a monopoly ; but rent is paid in Dakota in the same counties in which the best government land can be had upon payment of a few dollars in fees to the land office. The theory of rent reduces the share of the tenant in the produce of the soil to the cost of subsistence, but in the Mississippi Valley a very large proportion of the tenant farmers grow well-to-do, and those who begin as renters usually end as landowners.

These theories of population, wages, and rent are worse than bloodless. They are murderous. Profit, Ricardo claims, " is never increased by a better distribution of labor, by the invention of machinery, or by any means of abridging labor. . . . These operate on price, and are beneficial to consumers, but they have no effect whatever on profit ; on the other hand, every diminution in the wages of labor raises profits.” This doctrine gives employers the same hint that the theory of rent gives landlords. If competition, cruder than conquest, were “ the exclusive regulator of rent ” and of these other things, or if the principles of competition explained them, as we see is not the case, it would be no crime to lay down these laws. The man of science must tell things as they are, and leave it to the moralist to say how they ought to be. These doctrines of the desire of wealth, of exclusive regulation by competition, and of the irresistible laws of trade have been a royal road for shifting responsibility for injustice and legal selfishness from human shoulders upon the back of Nature. If these laws are proved to be no laws, and we see they are not laws, the orthodox economists are left in a bad plight. They claimed to be teachers of science ; that is, of things as they are. They turn out to be teachers both of what is not and of what ought not to be. They are neither scientific nor moral. Hence it is that Mill’s head, though not his noble heart, almost deserves the charge made by Ruskin, with deliberation and reaffirmation, of willfully “ aiding and abetting the cruelest form of murder on many thousands of persons yearly, for the sake simply of putting money into the pockets of the landlords.”

The competitive political economists ignore the natural history of their subject, its economic news. The differences of character and circumstances that make the English and French disposed to stay at home, while the Irish and Germans emigrate freely, are not to be explained by competition. The abstract economists dismiss as aberrations and exceptions to their cosmopolitan equilibrium those mysterious storms, which burst with something like periodicity over the world of credit, scattering ruin within the areas of high tariff and low tariff, free trade and protection, specie payments and “ fiat ” money, and the single and double standard. Political economy of the competitive school is dumb before the railroad question, for it is one of combination. A parliamentary commission reports that it has become more and more evident that competition must fail to do for railroads what it does for ordinary trade, and that no means have yet been devised by which competition between them can be maintained. Equally beyond the reach of this competitive science is the socialistic drift of modern government, which forbids self-interest to commit murder by the sale of adulterated food, which taxes property by a majority vote for the education of the masses and the regulation of their plumbing, and which in Great Britain offers to pay at the national expense the arrears of hundreds of thousands of Irish tenants. The labor question is the appearance among workingmen of the same spirit of combination that has given us railroad pools, the telegraph consolidation, the oil monopoly, and countless smaller “ corners,” and it cannot be solved by a science of competition. The professors assume that competition is the exclusive regulator of wages, but we see workingmen kill a workingman for competing with them. Rumors are in the air of a general strike this summer. It will include the telegraph operators and the railroad men. Communication by wire is to be cut as well as communication by rail. Civilization, at the lifting of the finger of some Knight of Labor, is to be disintegrated. Chicago, which now sends its messages to Wall Street in forty-five seconds, is to be thrown hack into the wilderness. A new organization of workingmen, the Knights of Labor, has sprung into existence within a year or two, and already numbers two hundred thousand members. Its principle is the unification of labor. Its motto, finer than the formulas of the economists, is, Injustice to one is injustice to all. Its purpose is to settle the differences between employers and employed, without strikes, if possible, but if a strike must be made, to back it up with the strength of the whole body. Twenty-five years’ experience has taught these men that individual trades-unions can be crushed out. They are going to “ pool,” like the railroads. Such a great fact as that in France the French Revolution was a turning point in the welfare of the laboring classes, whose condition, as Mill shows, has risen, and risen permanently, since then, is not on speaking terms with the theory of exclusive regulation of wages by competition. Laissez-faire theories of politics and political economy are useless in the treatment of the labor question, in the regulation of railroads, sanitary and educational government, and a multitude of similar questions. It is not to be denied that competition is an industrial force, and a mighty one, but it is only one. By neglecting the other forces, from sympathy to monopoly, the abstract political economist deduces principles which fit no realities, and has to neglect those realities for which we need principles most. When combination comes in at the door, this political economy of competition flies out of the window. It is a political economy of persons, not of the people.

II.

There is not, says Comte, any purely industrial human being. But occasionally there flourish, outside the jails, persons who are almost ideal exemplifications of the principles of the competitive political economy. America has produced the most successful of these practical political economists. His career illustrates what may be accomplished by a scientific devotion to the principles of competition, laissez-faire, desire of wealth, and self-interest, if not the harmony of interests.

While the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1853 was open in Now York, there came to seek his fortune in the city a slender, black-eyed, black-haired boy, from the inferior of the State. He brought with him a very handsome mahogany box. In the box was an invention : " a little thing,” he once said, “ I had brought from my country home, and thought was going to make my fortune and revolutionize the world. It was a mouse-trap.” The unsophisticated boy left his treasure on the seat of a Sixth Avenue car, while he stood on the platform to stare at the crowd, and it was stolen. But he pursued and caught the thief, who was an old offender, for whom the police of New York were looking at that moment. The Herald of the next day, under the heading How a Mouse-Trap caught a Thief, gave his first taste of publicity to the youth who for the next thirty years was to be continually before the public, and, by a singular coincidence, always in connection with some kind of trap. The genius that had divined from afar that the great city was full of mice, and had contrived a trap to catch them, could not be stolen. Its first impulse grew to be a passion. Brains and strict attention to the laws of supply and demand have made the country boy the greatest mouse-catcher of America, and his traps have become the envy of every man of feline aspirations.

Four of his inventions were masterpieces. In the first of them he gained the confidence of his simple prey by assuming a position of trust as director, and afterwards as president, of the largest railroad but one in his native State. At once there began to turn before the eyes of the stockholders and the public a kaleidoscope of ruin : shower after shower of stocks and bonds issued to run the road, while the trustee and his pals — pal is Old English for fellow trustee—drank dry the stream of earnings; a devil’s dance of lawyers, judges, legislators, governors, and Tammany politicians, flinging themselves into every attitude of betrayal of trust, — an orgy of fiduciary harlotry, led by a great law reformer; a tangled web of injunctions and counter-injunctions, and more injunctions, contradictory orders of courts, perjured affidavits, — every thread spun by its poisonous spinner around and around a trust; a phantasmagoria of prosperity, of busy trains and steamers, crowded ferries, marble opera-houses, bursting warehouses, glowing mills, precious franchises, and rich contracts, — a fair but hollow scene, where all the expenses go to the owner, and all the receipts to the trustee.

Our economist, having been charged with a fraud upon his road, at once procured from one of his courts the place of receiver, with a fund of $8,000,000, to protect his trust against himself. In one of his stock-exchange campaigns he locked up $12,500,000 of money, — other people’s money. New York rocked in the preliminary throes of panic, and there would have been a crash had not Secretary McCulloch interposed with the announcement that he would issue $50,000,000 of legal tenders, if this hand were not taken off the throat of business. An honest editor, Samuel Bowles, who denounced the alliance of Tammany and Erie, was abducted and illegally jailed. Assassination was attempted upon Dorman B. Eaton, another fearless denunciator, who was left for dead on the streets of New York, for having dared to act out the courageous words of Emerson: “ Good nature is plentiful, but we want justice, with heart of steel to fight down the proud.”

When this student of the science of abstraction became trustee, bis trust was in debt $51,005,943. Under his administration of the laws of competition, this became $115,449,211, while the mileage increased but 186 miles. In four months the increase was $23,500,000. The moral bankruptcy that festooned this ruin could not he expressed in figures. These surprising achievements in the pursuit of wealth led the New York legislature to order an investigation. The political economist of the mousetrap was charmingly frank in his answers to the committee : —

I was first elected president of the Erie Railroad in 1868, and I was president in 1869, 1870, and 1871. I do not remember whether I approved payment to William M. Tweed of money for legal services, while he was senator. I do not know whether he is a lawyer. He was a director of Erie and member of its executive committee. I would not have allowed pecuniary transactions with Mr. Tweed to be put in the shape of legal services, if my attention had been called to them. I do not contemplate going to Europe to-morrow. I should say that paper was in my handwriting. The name William M. Tweed is in my handwriting. The words in my handwriting are, William M. Tweed, legal disbursements as per order J. G., $35,000, April 25,1871. The approval of voucher, April 5, 1869, name of William M. Tweed, legal expenses, $15,000, looks like my handwriting. Mr. Tweed’s name at the top is my handwriting, and I should say his name at the foot of the receipt is my handwriting. He was senator in 1869; also in 1871 and 1872. The “ legal account ” was of an india-rubber character. I gave large amounts for elections in 1869, 1870, 1871, and 1872 in the senatorial and assembly districts. It was what they said would be necessary to carry the day in addition to the amount forwarded by the committee. I contributed more or less to all the districts along the line of the road. We had to look after four States, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. It was the custom, when men received nominations, to come to me for contributions, and I made them, and considered them good paying investments for the company. In a republican district, I was a strong republican ; in a democratic district, I was democratic; and in doubtful districts, I was doubtful. In politics, I was an Erie railroad man, every time. We had friends who were on both sides, — friends in a business way. The amounts contributed for the elections were large, but I could not give any definite estimate. No names occur to me at the moment. I am a poor hand to remember names. I had relations in several States. I did not keep separate what I paid out in New Jersey from what I paid out in New York. We had the same ground to go over there, and there has been so much of it. It has been so extensive that I have no details now to refresh my mind. You might as well go back and ask me how many cars of freight were moved on a particular day.¹

Entrenched behind the Tammany ring, controlling the courts, legislature, and executive of the State, and in his marble fortress on Twenty-Third Street resisting by the brute strength of the Erie ruffians the ordinary processes of law and social coercion, all our political economist asked for was non-interference of government with industry, and he got it. But the English stockholders cared less for laissez-faire theories of economy and government than to get possession of their property. Rights which American courts and legislatures refused to enforce, these foreigners took by violence. March 11, 1872, was the date of the Erie coup d'état. British gold corrupted some of the followers of the arch-trustee. A foreign minister of the United States returned from his post abroad to strike the blow, and rectify by a street brawl, as in the days of old Rome, the injustice of the government of his native land. In one day, with force, without authority of law, by foreigners, the management of one of the leading railroads of the United States was changed by revolution. It was one of those bodeful days for a republic, which, having come once, is likely to come again, when law is on the side of wrong and force is on the side of right, and force breaks down the law. Once more in possession of their property, the stockholders sought to see if the laws of the land would not give back that which the laws of the desire of wealth had taken away. Civil and criminal proceedings were threatened. The ex-trustee surrendered. He agreed to make restitution, if there were no prosecution. Again he appeared with a box. It was not the handsome mahogany box of his first mouse-trap. It was, says an eye-witness, a light yellow sheet-iron box, about ten inches deep and twentyeight inches square. In it was a miscellaneous lot of securities, to be restored by the trustee. A “ partial ” list of them, furnished to the Erie investigating committee of the New York legislature, showed a face value of $9,021,545, and a cash value of over $36,000,000.

It was no ordinary trap in which Wall Street and the whole country were caught on that darkest day of all our financial history, — Black Friday, September 24, 1869. On one side, it was supported by the New York Sub-Treasury, whose chief held his place for the purposes of the Gold Conspiracy. On another side, it rested in the coffers of the Erie Railroad, whose president was the boy of the mouse-trap. At a third point, it had, apparently, a personal connection with the President of the United States. Through the Tenth National Bank, whose president was the president of the Erie, it had the facilities of the National Banking Association. The Stock Exchange was the pitfall. Black panic, which this conjurer of the irresistible laws of trade had before called to his aid, came, bringing ruin to thousands, madness and death to more than one. In the Stock Exchange, the wires melted under the fire of dispatches. There are to-day men proud to tell you that in that moment of frenzy and horror they hunted, rope in hand, for this disciple of self-interest, and if they could have caught him would have hanged the maker of the mouse-trap that caught a thief only sixteen years before. But the president of the Erie road fled to his arsenal on Twenty-Third Street, and was secure. He saved his millions, for while his partners, by his advice, were buying, he was selling, selling, selling. He was promoted from investigation by a committee of the New York legislature to investigation by a committee of Congress. He told them, “ I had my own views about the market, and my own fish to fry.” He saved the millions of his magnetic lieutenant Fisk, by teaching him to repudiate the orders given to his brokers. Before their victims could crawl out from under the ruins of Black Friday they were served, as Charles Francis Adams, Jr., in his Chapters of Erie tells us, with injunctions prepared in batches, by David Dudley Field, forbidding them “ from pressing their pretended claims . . . by any proceedings.” A law reformer devised a scheme, and a judge supported it, by which the men who had been knocked down and robbed were prohibited, in the name of justice, from seeking justice. Physicians, licensed by the state to heal, preparing poisons for the use of assassins !

In December, 1880, what may be accomplished by steadfast faithfulness to the principles of competition was shown by a statement, made by the most trustworthy financial paper in the United States, that our political economist was in control of ten thousand miles of railroad, or more than one ninth the entire mileage of the country.

It was during the same month that the conflict between the Western Union and American Union telegraph companies was raging at its worst. The American Union had been started in 1879, by our hero, with an investment of less than five million dollars. Western Union stock tumbled to seventy-seven and one half in the last month of 1880. So little interest did he take in the stock market at this time that he did not visit Wall Street, but when not at home spent his time at the Windsor, across the street. Swinging his legs from a backtilted chair, he would tell his friends that Western Union was a worthless bundle of expiring patents, uncertain contracts, and old wires, and that he should not buy a share above sixty. February 5, 1881, Western Union and the American Union and the Atlantic and Pacific telegraph companies were consolidated, and the telegraph capital of the three, which was then sixty million dollars against four hundred thousand in 1856, was increased to eighty millions. The stock had never gone below seventy-seven and one half, but the inventor of the American Union snare was the owner of most of it. The price advanced to one hundred and thirty-seven and seven eighths, and the public found that the ex-trustee of Erie, the ally of the Tammany ring, the corrupter of justice, and the artificer of panic was master of the rapid transit of news and confidence within the United States, and between them and the rest of the world.

Hardly had the details of the telegraph consolidation been announced, February, 1881, when a flutter in the New York Stock Exchange followed the publication of a letter from the president of the Manhattan Elevated Railroad Company, begging the State to remit the taxes due from the company. It was a piteous plea for escape from ruin, and the stock began to fall. Next rose into view the highest judicial officer of the State, who declared with great indignation that Manhattan had forfeited its charter by insolvency, by failure to build roads, as stipulated by its charter, and by its shameless watering of stock. He began suit to wipe it out of existence. The public applauded with a thrill of satisfaction, and more stockholders sold. The hidden hand pulled another wire, and the editor of the New York World began to launch forth through its columns startling exhibits of the financial rottenness of the company, and editorial, that is virtuous, indignation at its abuse of the public and its franchises. Then came another can-can in the courts, led by lawyers, who danced long and well, according to the New York code of legal ethics that if a lawyer is not a judge he need not be a gentleman, and if he is a judge he need not be investigated. Receivers were appointed, more stock-watering was authorized by the courts, and affidavits poured forth from insiders that the company was hopelessly and irretrievably bankrupt, and its stock worthless. Manhattan stockholders flung their certificates away for what they could get. The price sank to fifteen and one fourth. Suddenly what had seemed a mass of ruin crystallized into the symmetrical structure of a monopoly, and on its peak, but a few days after he had sworn that Manhattan was hopelessly and irretrievably insolvent, sat the manufacturer of mousetraps, master of the rapid transit of the greatest city of America. The prentice hand that had fashioned the Erie trap had become the perfect instrument of an artist in the science of exchange. A suit, begun in the name of the people by the highest officer of justice, was set up as a rack on the floor of the Stock Exchange, and used there for six months as an instrument of torture. A judge of the supreme court sat in the manipulators’ rooms, and turned the screw by which the victims were forced to surrender their property. Receivers were appointed and dismissed, injunctions given and denied, orders issued and rescinded, and stock exchange arguments made in the guise of decisions : all this was done just as was demanded by our expert in the theory of the value of judicial honor. He bought his law in the courts where it was cheapest, and sold it in the Stock Exchange where it was dearest. Ninety thousand shares of Manhattan stock were shaken out in eight days, at an average price of twenty. The same judge did this who appointed hist relatives to places among the wreckers of the Continental Life Insurance Company of New York. Judge Barnard signed an Erie order in the rooms of a wanton; Judge Westbrook has repeatedly held court in a worse place, — the private office of this dealer in judicial virtue.

When receivers were appointed for Manhattan, they were two hired men in the employ of him who was known to the court to be suing the company privately, and their bonds, signed by his associates, were ready in advance of the action of the court. The lawyer who was conducting the private suit against Manhattan was retained as assistant in the people’s suit by the attorney-general, and the company he was suing was compelled to pay his fees. The attorney-general began his public suit on the same day the wrecker of Manhattan began his private suit. When the attorney-gencral dismissed his action, not a single day had been given to the people for the trial of their case against the company on its merits. In July, 1881, suits were pending against the three elevated railroad companies in all the courts in New York in which they could be brought. Every appeal for relief to the courts by those whose property was being forced out of them was met by rebuff, and by the victory of the men in whose private offices the court sat to decide a public action, brought in the public name by a public officer. One of the reasons given by the attorneygeneral for discontinuing his suit was that arrangements had been made for the payment of the taxes in dispute. The latest incident in this extraordinary history is the appearance at Albany of a powerful lobby to procure from the legislature release from these taxes. This lobby is described by the New York Times — which has attacked the Manhattan iniquity with a brilliant intrepidity equal to that with which it overthrew the Tammany ring — as the most dangerous which has appeared in Albany for many years.

Procuring one hundred shares of Metropolitan Elevated Railroad stock, the manipulator of Manhattan solicited the position of director of Metropolitan, and, under promises that he would build this company up, obtained for himself and his associates the control of the Metropolitan board of direction. Then, owning in all but one sixty-fifth of the property, they deliberately proceeded to rob it. Owners of Manhattan and trustees of Metropolitan, they stripped the latter company of the ten per cent. annual dividend guaranteed by Manhattan, and substituted for it a contingent dividend of four per cent., which may or may not be paid. This they did against the protests of the Metropolitan stockholders whose agents they were. In all this work a prominent part was taken by a great philanthropist, who, having sworn that the New York elevated railroad company of which he was president was earning ten per cent. net a year, accepted for its stockholders a six per cent. annual dividend guaranteed by Manhattan, which he had sworn to be bankrupt; and after he had sworn Manhattan to be bankrupt, allowed it an annual dividend of four per cent. The same willingness to call up the spirit of panic showed itself as in the gold conspiracy. To make certain stockholders of Metropolitan surrender their property, attacks were made in The World on the credit of the Shoe and Leather Bank and the Tradesmen’s Bank, behind which they were supposed to have found financial refuge. When a property owner of New York remonstrated with Vice-President Galloway of the Manhattan about some encroachments by the elevated roads, he received this reply, which embodies the whole of one of the latter-day theories of wealth : “ We have the legislature on our side, the courts on our side, and we hire our law by the year.”

A man who braves the heart-broken rage of fifty millions of men, and in daylight shoots their President, we call an assassin. George Washington hanged as a spy the man who traveled the highroad as an instrument in Benedict. Arnold’s treachery. We teach our children to execrate as traitors the men who stood up in a fair fight to divide the Union. What shall we call the man and the men who seduce, but do not assassinate,— Guiteaus of political economy who would overcome, not one, but all departments of our government; who travel by night and under-ground to betray trusts they have invited ; who, living among us as fellow-men and neighbors, loyal to the covenants of society, are traitors to all the ties of honor, justice, and mercy that make the American community possible, and the want of which makes the Paris commune ? By what title do these men hold their acquisitions ? Private property is sacred, but plunder must not be private. A philosopher of the commune said, “ Property is theft.” American selfgovernment must have a philosophy to say, Theft shall not be property.

It is March 13, 1882. The boy who brought his mahogany box and his mouse-trap to New York in 1853 sits in an office rich with plate-glass and precious woods. He opens his box, which like him has grown, and shows a group of friends twenty-three million dollars of Western Union stock, twelve millions of Missouri Pacific stock, eight millions of elevated railroad stocks and bonds, ten millions of Wabash common and preferred, and other stock. “ Morosini,” he says, " can bring you down twenty millions more, or so, in bonds and other things.” This, like the Erie restitution, was a “ partial list.” Seventy-three millions, and more, accumulated by an enthusiast in competition in twenty-nine years of office work ! Never before in the history of the desire of wealth had such a sight been seen. The mousetrap man’s wires told the news to the people of two continents, and the world held its breath.

On the same day, while the president of the Wabash road, which had appropriated for dividends to stockholders the wages due its men, was thus spreading out his millions, a day laborer, in the employ of the Wabash at St. Louis, said to a reporter : —

The delay in the payment of my wages has reduced me almost to beggary. Had not the grocer helped me with credit in January and February, my children would have starved.

An engineer said: —

My family were sick in January. They had no doctor and no medicines. I could not get the money due me from the Wabash road.

An old man, who watched a crossing, — an infirm old man, with a family, — said : —

My rent is six dollars a mouth ; my groceries are eighteen dollars. This leaves us one dollar a month for clothing, medicine, and other necessaries. My pay is twenty-five dollars a month, and I have to wait two months for that. We are on the edge of starvation.

It is a solemn truth, that of Ruskin’s, that every man has to choose in this world whether he will be a laborer or an assassin. There are men who murder for money, but there must be no science of assassination.

Henry D. Lloyd.