me it had long been one of his intellectual amusements to try to force into the heads of railroad presidents the fact that their ownership of that kind of property was profoundly different from the ownership of a horse or a grocery store. "I finally," he said, "had to give it up." It meant nothing to them that society had given them stupendous privileges which qualified their ownership. These franchise-grants once in their pockets, everything that was built upon them came to be used in any conceivable game to enrich the owner.

Properly informed persons no longer discuss whether it is right and moral to allow railroad magnates to do as they like—to act as if these properties were strictly a private possession. We know, at last, how society has suffered from leaving this form of ownership so long without social control. We have seen the devastating conflict between unregulated possession of this kind of property and all the higher welfare of the community. If we add to the railway the common city monopolies of lighting and transportation; if we add industries in iron and steel, much of our mining, oil, and forest exploitation, all of which, in connection with railways, take on inevitably the form of monopoly, we have the whole buccaneer-group that has done upon our politics the deadly work, which we know so well that its retelling is a thing to avoid from very weariness.

Though a dozen other cities would serve as well, look for a moment at the monopoly of the New York street-railways. A people, careless and ignorant of their own interests, so far give away the rights in their streets, that a few men get them into their possession. With the grip once fast upon this power, it becomes not a machinery primarily to serve the people: primarily it becomes an enginery to filch vast unearned increments from the public. It becomes a device for gambling, with the dice so heavily loaded in your favor that you cannot lose. You change power from one kind to another; you merge one line with another or with the whole; you create holding companies; and at every change you recapitalize. Your million dollars is turned into five or ten or twenty millions, in order that multiplied dividends taken from the public may drop into private pockets. Every bit of bookkeeping meant for the public eye is a mass of jugglery. If you are frightened by the challenge of an indignant public, the most important records are destroyed. Surplus funds belonging to the stockholders are freely loaned to personal friends or put to private speculative ventures.

This shell-game has gone on decade after decade, so gayly that it seems as if it were a delight to the American people to have their pockets picked. And yet, let us say it over and over again, the pocket-picking is not the worst of it. That the people's money should be used to debauch their own chosen representatives in city and state legislatures is the uttermost evil. Part and parcel of the uttermost evil is the resulting suspicion and distrust that eat their way deep through the masses of the wage-earning world. Not to mention their own trade papers, or the socialistic sheets with the scandals of high and low finance, wage-earners have only to read the capitalistic sheets, presidential messages, and summarized reports from scores of legislative committees, in order to believe that almost everything investigated—insurance, city traction companies, mining syndicates, railway finance—is heavy with rottenness. Any one interested enough to run through the files of the distinctively labor press at the present moment, will find a body of convinced opinion about those who control us industrially that has an extremely ugly look. The labor-world is drawing the only natural inference it can