hat if capitalists, without any other aim than that of augmenting
their dividends at other people's expense, can exploit railways
successfully without establishing an International
Department,--societies of working men will be able to do it just as
well, and even better, without nominating a Ministry of European
railways.

Another objection is raised that is more serious at first sight. We may
be told that the agreement we speak of is not perfectly _free_, that the
large companies lay down the law to the small ones. It might be
mentioned, for example, that a certain rich German company, supported by
the State, compel travellers who go from Berlin to Bale to pass via
Cologne and Frankfort, instead of taking the Leipzig route; or that such
a company carries goods a hundred and thirty miles in a roundabout way
(on a long distance) to favour its influential shareholders, and thus
ruins the secondary lines. In the United States travellers and goods are
sometimes compelled to travel impossibly circuitous routes so that
dollars may flow into the pocket of a Vanderbilt.

Our answer will be the same: As long as Capital exists, the Greater
Capital will oppress the lesser. But oppression does not result from
Capital only. It is also owing to the support given them by the State,
to monopoly created by the State in their favour, that the large
companies oppress the small ones.

The early English and French Socialists have shown long since how
English legislation did all in its power to ruin the small industries,
drive the peasant to poverty, and deliver over to wealthy industrial
employers battalions of men, compelled to work for no matter what
salary. Railway legislation did exactly the same. Strategic lines,
subsidized lines, companies which received the International Mail
monopoly, everything was brought into play to forward the interests of
wealthy financiers. When Rothschild, creditor to all European States,
puts capital in a railway, his faithful subjects, the ministers, will do
their best to make him earn more.

In the United States, in the Democracy that authoritarians hold up to us
as an ideal, the most scandalous fraudulency has crept into everything
that concerns railroads. Thus, if a company ruins its competitors by
cheap fares, it is often enabled to do so because it is reimbursed by
land given to it by the State for a gratuity. Documents recently
published concerning the American wheat trade have fully shown up the