differs greatly from that
held by the great majority of the American people. He says: "The fact,
the truth is, that (however it may be in other countries) the
accumulation of wealth and centralization of commerce in great
combinations has never, in the United States, been a source of
oppression or of poverty to the non-capitalist or wage-worker." There is
scarcely an evil in railroad management which Mr. Morgan does not
defend. Pools, construction companies, rebates, discriminations and
over-capitalization all find favor in Mr. Morgan's eye. "Rebates and
discriminations," he says, "are neither peculiar to railways nor
dangerous to the 'Republic.' They are as necessary and as harmless to
the farmer as is the chromo which the seamstress or the shop girl gets
with her quarter-pound of tea from the small tea merchant, and no more
dangerous to the latter than are the aforesaid chromos to the small
recipients." Pools and combinations receive an unusually large share of
Mr. Morgan's attention. A few selections from his effusions in their
favor may be given here, viz.:

"These pools are the legitimate and necessary results of the
rechartering over and over again of railway companies to transact
business between the same points by paralleling each other. So long as
the people in their legislatures will thus charter parallel lines
serving identical points--thus dividing territory they once granted
entire--it is not exactly clear how they can complain if the lines built
(by money invested, if not on the good faith of the people, at least in
reliance upon an undivided business) combine to save themselves from
bankruptcy." And again: "Against the inequality of their own rates and
the hardship of the long and short haul (in other words, against the
discrimination of nature and of physical laws) no less than against the
peril of bankruptcy and the consequent speculative tendency of their
stocks (after which may come the wrecking, the watering, and the vast
individual fortunes), the railways of this republic have endeavored, by
establishment of pool commissions, to defend both the public and
themselves.... The honest administration of railways for all interests,
the payment of their fixed charges, the solvency of their securities,
the faithful and valuable performance of their duties as carriers, can
be conserved in but one way--by living tariffs, such as the pools once
guaranteed."

In the following passage this author denies to th