Читать книгу Our Benevolent Feudalism - William J. Ghent - Страница 8

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We have, first, the enormous growth of industrial, commercial, and financial combinations. A crude idea of the extent to which concentration in manufactures had grown up to May 31, 1900, may be gained from Census Bulletin No. 122. In this report only those aggregations are considered which consisted of “a number of formerly independent mills which have been brought together into one company under a charter obtained for that purpose.” Several of the new security-holding stock companies are included, but “many large establishments comprising a number of mills which have grown up, not by combination with other mills, but by erection of new plants or the purchase of old ones,” are not considered, nor are gas and electric lighting plants, or pools, and “gentlemen’s agreements.”

The list contains records of 183 corporations, with 2029 active and 174 idle plants, an average of 11 active plants each. The actual capital invested in these corporations, exclusive of that for 56 of the idle plants, was $1,458,522,573, and the authorized capitalization was $3,607,539,200. These combinations employed 24,585 salaried officers and clerks, and an average of 399,192 wage-earners. The 1047 officers received an average of $6,825.28 yearly and the wage-earners, $487.32. There were 40 combinations in iron and steel, with 447 plants; 28 in liquor and beverages, with 219 plants; 21 in food and allied products, with 273 plants; 15 in clay, glass, and stone products, with 180 plants, and 14 in chemicals, with 248 plants. The gross value of the manufactured product of these combinations, as given by the census, was $1,661,295,364. Excluding hand trades, government establishments, educational, eleemosynary, and penal workshops, and shops with a product of less than $500, this total represented 14 per cent of the value of the manufactured product for the whole country.

The spring of 1900 was, however, but the mid-morning of the combination movement. Only 63 of these companies had been formed previous to 1897, while more than 50 per cent of them were formed during the eighteen months from January 1, 1899, to June 30, 1900. Since then the movement has swept forward like a great tide. The consolidations of manufacturing companies for the first five months of 1901 alone probably exceeded $2,000,000,000 in capitalization. The great steel “trust” (to use the popular term), an $88,000,000 tin-can trust, still other trusts in tobacco machinery, carpets, coal and coke, witch-hazel, glass lamps and electric glass fittings, ship-building, cotton duck, agricultural implements, and watches, had their birth during this period. More recently came the steel-castings trust, subordinate to the steel corporation, a recombination in tobacco, and very lately a new ship-building combination, a $120,000,000 harvester trust, and a cotton compress trust. The capital invested in manufacturing combinations is now probably two and one-half times what it was in May, 1900; and it is a reasonable guess that nearly one-third of the manufactured product of the country, outside of the petty trades, comes from the combinations.

Of the magnitude of some of these concerns the average mind can form but an inadequate idea. The figures expressing it are comparable with those of star distances, which must be transmuted into light-years to make them conceivable. A New York newspaper has recently made some computations on the great steel trust, which help to bring home to us a realization of its size and power. Its yearly net profits are now double the amount of the total revenues of the United States Government in the year Lincoln was elected. Its wage-roll carries on an average of the round year over 158,000 names—an army of employees larger by 45,000 than serves the National Government in every branch of its civil service, classified and unclassified, except only fourth-class postmasters. Its wage-payments for last year aggregated nearly $113,000,000, more by $13,000,000 than the huge annual city budget of Greater New York. Its annual production of steel is 10,000,000 tons, 67 per cent of the total production of the country; and its freight payments for the year 1901 amounted to more than $54,000,000.

During the same period financial, commercial, mining, and transportation trusts have also had their splendid inning. We read of an accident-insurance trust with a capitalization of $50,000,000, the great shipping trust, the $120,000,000 jobbing hardware trust, the Interurban Street Railway stock-holding combination, the beef trust, a $50,000,000 lead merger, a recombination in copper, and a universal oil trust. Moody’s Manual of Corporation Securities for 1902 gives a list of 82 industrial and mercantile consolidations effected between January 1, 1899, and September 1, 1902, each of which is capitalized at $10,000,000 or more, the whole aggregating a capitalization of $4,318,005,646. Thirty-nine of these, with $1,232,947,790 authorized capital, were formed during 1899; 7 with $186,110,400 capital, in 1900; 20 with $2,141,197,456 capital in 1901, and 16 with $757,750,000 capital during the first eight months of 1902. The list is admittedly incomplete. “It embraces only the so-called gigantic combinations which have been forming in the past three and one-half years. A complete list, without regard to date of formation, and including both large and small,” says this authority, “would probably aggregate 850 different-going combinations, and would easily foot up over $9,000,000,000 of capitalization. Including railroad consolidations, such a list would make a total of over $15,000,000,000 outstanding capitalization.” As for the railroads, the formation of the Northern Securities Company, the recent assimilation of the Louisville and Nashville, and the “reorganization” of the Rock Island show the same drift. Five men, according to a recent statement of Interstate Commerce Commissioner J. A. Prouty, control all the railroads of the country; and Mr. John W. Gates, a financier who may be supposed to know something on that head, has more recently declared, according to a newspaper interview, that two men are really in control. “I believe that the time is not far distant,” declared Professor Francis L. Patton, former head of Princeton University, in a recent address before the Presbyterian Social Union of Chicago, “when there will not be a thing that we eat, drink, or wear that will not be made by a trust.” He might have gone farther and fared as well; for the theatrical trust determines what dramas we shall witness; the pulp trust, the typefounders’ trust, the news trust, and the school-book trust exert a most direct bearing on what we read and what our reading costs us; and finally the undertakers’ trust determines the style and cost of our burial.