United States or Lesotho ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
If Dad had been a coal baron, like Mr. Tudor Carstairs, or a stock-watering captain of industry, like Mrs. Sanderson-Spear's husband, or descended from a long line of whisky distillers, like Mrs. Carmichael Porter, why, then his little Elizabeth would have been allowed the to sit in seat of the scornful with the rest of the Four Hundred, and this story would never have been written.
The history of the telegraph monopoly is too well known to be more than alluded to here, but it is only fair to Morse to state that he had sold all his telegraph stock, and had retired from active participation in the management of the different companies, long before the system of stock-watering began which has been carried on to the present day.
If, in transforming these discordant railroads into one, Vanderbilt bribed legislatures and corrupted courts, if he engaged in the largest stock-watering operations on record up to that time, and took advantage of inside information to make huge winnings on the stock exchange, he also ripped up the old iron rails and relaid them with steel, put down four tracks where formerly there had been two, replaced wooden bridges with steel, discarded the old locomotives for new and more powerful ones, built splendid new terminals, introduced economies in a hundred directions, cut down the hours required in a New York-Chicago trip from fifty to twenty-four, made his highway an expeditious line for transporting freight, and transformed railroads that had formerly been the playthings of Wall Street and that frequently could not meet their pay-rolls into exceedingly profitable, high dividend paying properties.
Bankers and others who organized combinations were given returns that seemed as extravagant as the prices paid to railroad construction companies; the issues of the stock of corporations were bought and sold by their own officers for speculative purposes; and stock-watering was as common as in railroading.
In 1872 the Labor Reformers demanded fair rates and no discrimination; in 1876 the Prohibitionists called for lower rates; in 1880 the Greenbackers stood for fair and uniform rates; four years later they urged laws which would put an end to pooling, stock-watering and discrimination, and in the same year the Republicans promised an act to regulate commerce if they were elected.
Word Of The Day