The Arena
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It is only the most inattentive of historical students who can afford
to ignore this. No modern aesthetician from the Rhine to the Spree
affects to dispute the succession of Teutonic thought, in its various
forms of passion, from Beethoven to Goethe, from Schiller, Jean Paul,
or Weber, or Ravner, or Kleist, or Immermann, down to the latest high
priest of the pre-historic cult--down to Richard Wagner himself! It
was precisely this that the Emperor Frederick knew as crown prince,
and that the chancellor had to learn. With the crown prince all was
present. The farthest past was with him; the leaves of the _uralte_
forests had whispered their dream lore in his ears as in those of the
_Siegfried_ of the Niebelungen; he had seen Otto von Wittelsbach
strike dead his very Kaiser for breach of faith[6] and stood by at the
Donnersberg, when mighty Rudolph's son slew Adolf of Napan for his
base attempt at usurpation. He knew it all, legend or chronicle; no
secret was hidden from him, and the national pulse beat in him with
fiery throb from the first hour when the national conscience had been
touched. The chancellor was chilled by his own statecraft, and the
king, as he then was, had witnessed the Napoleonic wars.
[6] The heroic founder of the Bavarian monarchy, Otho of
Writtelsbach, was betrayed shamefully by his friend,
the Emperor Philip, of Suabia, and slew him for his
treachery. This is one of the oldest dramas on the
German stage.
Between the crown prince and Bismarck, however, there existed one
point of contact. Each was a _Deutsche Student_, and there, later on,
was to be found the true conversion of the chancellor to national
ideas.
As in every genuine lover of his country (and that Prince Bismarck
is), there lay latent in the famous "White Cuirassier" the same ideal
capacity of warlike action and intellectuality that so distinguished
Frederick II. No one understood better the complex son of Carlyle's
roystering barrack hero, no one knew in reality more deeply that the
ideas planted by him in men's minds were those of the majesty of
intelligence, of the royalty of humanity's brain power.
Count Bismarck proved his political foresight by the rapidity with
which he seized on the Schleswig-Holstein question as being the axis
on which turned the entire evolution (if ever it should be possible!)
of the imperial German unity. About that he hesitated not one moment.
He adopted the whole theory of Dahlmann, who alone spoke it out in
words in 1848-9, but he feared to plunge at one leap into the vortex
of his own threatening conclusions and tried for several years to
stave off the "pay day." He was somewhat slower to recognize the
identity of feeling through all the Germanic races, to realize the
equally strong vibration, the psychologic harmony quivering through
heart and soul from North to South, through the mysteriously hidden
dramas of fifteen hundred years. He believed himself a narrow
Particularist Borussian, a "Pomeranian Giant," and let a score of
years go by before clearly making out by touch that the strange change
of tonality, of sound, and significance that superposed the patriotism
of the South to that of the North was a mere inharmonic change, and
that according to the rotation of the two circles, each, in reality,
underlay the other in turn.
It would be a fatal mistake to imagine that M. von Bismarck allowed
himself to be led into the Danish campaign. He did nothing to bring it
about, but the instant it showed itself on the cards he took advantage
of it in the most predetermined, authoritative way, leaving his
Austrian accomplice and victim no possibility of escape. From the hour
when, in 1853, he boarded Count Richberg on the Carlsbad Railroad, and
forced his enemy of the _Francfort Bund_ to become his humble servant
and carry out all his designs, to the hour when, in 1865, he drove
Franz Joseph to sign the Condiminium on what he knew was a mere waste
paper, he was resolved to turn to account the extraordinary
opportunity offered him by the incredible blindness and insensate
terror of revolution of his allies. In the Austrians, the dread of
what the smaller States, encouraged by Hungary, might attempt,
paralyzed every other consideration, and besides that, the abortive
little plans of Count Beust, in Saxony, served to point out to him
what other Germans were, in a purely German sense, thinking of, and he
decided that the grand historic game thrust upon his perceptions and
waited for by all around him, should be played by himself alone. Then
he played it, not before seeing at once what it must entail, but by no
means assured that he could win.
And then, they who watched him nearest and knew him best, know how he
played that game, mindful of every event that filled the long history
of the past, living over again all the struggles, all the glories and
defeats of all the European nations far or near, finding examples both
to imitate or avoid, losing sight of nothing, from Gregory VII. to
Gutenberg, from papal obscurantism to the Reformation's blaze of
light; from Wallenstein's murder to the treaty of Utrecht; from
Richelieu to the scaffold of Louis XVI., and while calculating every
catastrophe, keeping steadily on his way.
This, the fearful period between the Crimean War, when first Cavour
stepped forth to the incident of Ems, when the die was cast, this was
the really magnificent passage in the great chancellor's career, for
this was the time of possible doubt when responsibility lay so heavy
that to elude it might be called prudence, and which to have survived
is already a proof of superiority over common humanity.
And here we assert the true grandeur of the precursor,--of the one
whom we have called the inventor, and who undeniably was so--of
Cavour! There can be no question that his own intimate familiarity
with the details of the Bond of Virtue and the War of Freedom[7] of
the glorious epoch when modern Germany headed and achieved the
victorious movement against the world's debasement,--brought
distinctly to Bismarck's mental vision the splendor of Cavour's
impossibly unequal contest for Italian freedom! The situations were
essentially much alike, but so much grander for the Italian statesman,
Italy's odds being so immeasurably longer! But still the likeness came
out, and the future chancellor could in no way aspire to be an
initiator. The end was still a gigantic one, and one to which no true,
brave patriot dared be false as an ideal,--but how as to the
execution? As to the practical means of carrying out conceptions that
might daily be doomed to alteration?
[7] The celebrated victory of the Great Elector, that made
Prussia into a kingdom.
There it was again that the figure of Cavour arose supreme; his long,
inexhaustible patience, his undying hopes, his sacrifices day by day
of the very springs of life for a self-imposed duty,--these were his
titles to immortal fame, these constituted his sovereign right to
success. But was not the worst probation over when Waterloo was won,
and was it not an accepted theory that the Vienna Congress had settled
all the vexed questions of ancient Europe? Any further movement,
therefore, might seem merely a disturbance. This, for conservative
statesmen above all, was a dilemma.
Germany had liberated not Germany only, but the world in 1813, and had
already had her Cavours!
There was no denying it: the Cavour of Germany was Stein. But was the
work done? Had the Congress of Vienna settled anything, for was that
still left to do without which the independence and well-being of
forty millions of Germans was unguaranteed, and the peace of all
Europe uninsured? If so, what remained to be achieved? to complete
what the German Cavour, the Precursor Stein, had begun, to embody and
make real the glorious dreams of which Queen Louise had been the
symbol, the Joan of Arc?[8]
[8] I would recommend every student of history to read
attentively the extraordinary article of M. Paleologue
in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ entitled "_La Reine
Louise de Prusse Comment se Fait une Legende_." It is a
poetic but true suite to Professor Levy Bruehl's
magnificent study.
That, indeed, brought the Hohenzollerns on the scene, and lent to
prosaic history its legend, giving to Frederick's "big battalions" the
white-robed heroine who should lead them on.
Whether, through the long years of indecision, during which disorder
and revolution seemed the danger to be averted, the future
"Chancellor of Iron" matured his plans after the manner of Newton, by
"forever thinking of them" is still a question to be adequately
answered by himself alone. This much is certain that when, in 1863-64,
the subject of the Duchies cast its shadow on the path, it revealed
its importance to Bismarck, as it had done fourteen years previously
to Dahlmann, and stood forth distinctly as the initial syllable of the
one mystical word, _Unity_.
_Schleswig-Holstein_ was, as a matter of fact, and by all its several
complications, the German question; it was its sign and portent, and
if action of some sort were not taken thereupon, the door set ajar was
closed upon the future, for a generation at least. Palmerston's
declaration, than which no unwiser one was ever made, touching the
insanity of the man who should seek to understand the enigma of the
Danish Duchies, was adopted in England solely from the dense and
inconceivable ignorance of the British mind on all German topics, and
the equally inexplicable but inborn dislike of all British politicians
to grapple with any serious study of them.
It was the problem to which no German of the North could show
indifference; and it was the one subject which brought Prussia to the
fore, and put her reigning house in the van, forcing the Hohenzollerns
into predominance. This was a crucial point, and wondrous to record!
the will of Bismarck on that exceedingly curious detail brought the
Hapsburgs together with the Hohenzollerns; Frederick with
Marie-Therese, Wallenstein's camp with Rebels, in an unescapable
atmosphere of rank Germanism!
But here again the first step of the forthcoming ruler was taken in
obedience to an irresistible, though, perhaps, unavowed, national
suggestion. The sense of _all_ that the past had given to German
history, to the power of German thought, formed a part of Bismarck's
very nature, and spite of the timidity of his experienced statecraft,
he could not disobey the promptings of the German conscience.
When the quick-witted French public applied to Professor Levy Bruehl's
work the title of "The idea whence comes the fact," they awarded it
its permanent signification; it is the development of the German
conscience that causes the imperial unity of Germany, and no one is
more thoroughly aware of that than the famous chancellor.
We feel with whomsoever was a witness of the crowning struggle, that
nothing can even paint its gigantic character more aptly than the
concluding phrase of the now famous French historian:--
... "Thus was formed the virtual German nation,--the nation that
willed to be, and for long years could not be because reality refused
to bear out practically all its ideals. It was in truth, _l'ame qui
cherche un corps_!"
These words can never be improved upon. The chancellor knows their
truth, as the _Kronprinz_ knew it, but the years lying between them
threw a certainty of glory into one which the other could not attain
to,--and Bismarck, too, was a man of old Prussia, of her ancient
traditions and formalities, while the crown prince was modern amongst
moderns--a soldier, yes! but pre-eminently a man, a citizen; but
though each felt his conviction differently, its strength was one and
the same in both.
The unity of Germany was the creation of no individual. German unity
and the imperial unity sprang from the whole past of German history
and German thought. The State existing now is the outcome of Germany's
own self, of the idea, of the soul of Germany.
"SHOULD THE NATION OWN THE RAILWAYS?"[9]
BY C. WOOD DAVIS.
PART II.--THE ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL OWNERSHIP.
[9] The first part of this admirable essay appeared in July
ARENA.
First would be the stability and practical uniformity of rates now
impossible, as they are subject to change by hundreds of officials,
and are often made for the purpose of enriching such officials. State
and federal laws have had the effect of making discriminations less
public and less numerous, but it is doubtful if they are less
effective in enriching officials and their partners, although it may
be necessary to be more careful in covering tracks. That they are
continued is within the cognizance of every well-informed shipper, and
are made clear by such cases as that of Counselman and Peasley, now
before the United States Supreme Court. Counselman and Peasley--one a
large shipper and the other a prominent railway official--refused to
testify before a United States grand jury upon the plea that to do so
might criminate themselves; the federal law making it a criminal
offence to make or benefit by discriminating rates. Counselman had
been given rates on corn, some five cents less per hundred pounds than
others, from Kansas and Nebraska points to Chicago.
The outrageous character of this discrimination will appear when we
reflect that five cents per one hundred pounds is an enormous profit
on corn that the grower has sold at from eighteen to twenty-two cents
per one hundred pounds, and that such a margin would tend to drive
every one but the railway officials and their secret partners out of
the trade, as has practically been the case on many western roads.
Doubtless such rates are sometimes made in order to take the commodity
over a certain line, and there is no divide with the officials; but
the effect upon the competitors of the favored shipper and the public
is none the less injurious, and such practices would not obtain under
national ownership, when railway users would be treated with honesty
and impartiality, which the experience of half a century shows to be
impossible with corporate ownership.
Referring to the rate question in their last report, the Interstate
Commerce Commission says: "If we go no farther than the railroad
managers themselves for information, we shall not find that it is
claimed that railroad service, as a whole, is conducted without unjust
discriminations."
"If rates are secretly cut, or if rebates are given to large shippers,
the fact of itself shows the rates which are charged to the general
public are unreasonable, for they are necessarily made higher than
they ought to be in order to provide for the cut or to pay the
rebate."
"If the carrier habitually carries a great number of people free, its
regular rates are made the higher to cover the cost; if heavy
commissions are paid for obtaining business, the rates are made the
higher that the net revenues may not suffer in consequence; if
scalpers are directly or indirectly supported by the railroad
companies, the general public refunds to the companies what the
support costs."
The Commission quotes a Chicago railway manager as saying: "Rates are
absolutely demoralized and neither shippers, passengers, railways, or
the public in general make anything by this state of affairs. Take
passenger rates for instance; they are very low; but who benefits by
the reduction? No one but the scalpers.... In freight matters the case
is just the same. Certain shippers are allowed heavy rebates, while
others are made to pay full rates.... The management is dishonest on
all sides, and there is not a road in the country that can be accused
of living up to the interstate law. Of course when some poor devil
comes along and wants a pass to save him from starvation, he has
several clauses of the interstate act read to him; but when a rich
shipper wants a pass, why he gets it at once."
From years of ineffectual efforts on the part of State and national
legislatures and commissions to regulate the rate business, it would
appear that the only remedy is national ownership, which would place
the rate-making power in one body with no inducement to act otherwise
than fairly and impartially, and this would simplify the whole
business and relegate an army of traffic managers, general freight
agents, soliciting agents, brokers, scalpers, and hordes of traffic
association officials to more useful callings while relieving the
honest user of the railway of intolerable burthens.
Under corporate control, railways and their officials have taken
possession of the majority of the mines which furnish the fuel so
necessary to domestic and industrial life, and there are but few
coalfields where they do not fix the price at which so essential an
article shall be sold, and the whole nation is thus forced to pay
undue tribute.
Controlling rates and the distribution of cars, railway officials have
driven nearly all the mine owners who have not railways or railway
officials for partners, to the wall. For instance, in Eastern Kansas,
on the line of the St. Louis & San Francisco Railway Company, were two
coal companies, whose plants were of about equal capacity, and several
individual shippers. The railway company and its officials became
interested in one of the coal companies, and such company was, by the
rebate and other processes, given rates which averaged but forty per
cent. of the rates charged other shippers, the result being that all
the other shippers were driven out of the business, a part of them
being hopelessly ruined before giving up the struggle. In addition to
gross discriminations in rates this railway company practised worse
discriminations in the distribution of cars; for instance, during one
period of five hundred and sixty-four days, as was proven in court,
they delivered to the Pittsburg Coal Company, 2,371 empty cars to be
loaded with coal, although such company had sale for, and capacity to
produce and load, during the same period, more than 15,000 cars.
During the same time this railway company delivered to the Rogers Coal
Company, in which the railway company and C. W. Rogers, its
vice-president and general manager, were interested, no less than
15,483 coal cars, while four hundred and fifty-six were delivered to
individual shippers. In other words, the coal company owned in large
part by the railway and its officials was given eighty-two per cent.
of all the facilities to get coal to market, although the other
shippers had much greater combined capacity than had the Rogers Coal
Company.
During the last four months of the period named, and when the
Pittsburg Coal Company had the plant, force, and capacity to load
thirty cars per day, they received an average of one and a fourth cars
per day, resulting, as was intended, in the utter ruin of a
prosperous business and the involuntary sale of the property, while
the railway coal company, the railway officials, and the accommodating
friends who operated the Rogers Coal Company, made vast sums of money;
and when all other shippers had thus been driven off the line the
price of coal was advanced to the consumer.
On another railway, traversing the same coal-field, the railway or its
officials became interested in the Keith & Perry Coal Company--the
largest coal company doing business on the line--and here the plan
seems to have been, in addition to the manipulation of rates, to
starve other mine operators out, and force them to sell their coal to
the Keith & Perry Company, by failing to furnish the needed cars to
those who did not sell their coal to the Keith & Perry Company at a
very low price.
When the Keith & Perry Company had a great demand for coal, such
parties as sold the product of their mines to that company were
furnished with cars, but for the other operators cars were not to be
had, such cars as were brought to the field being assigned to such
parties as were loading to the Keith & Perry Company, because that
company furnished the coal consumed by the locomotives of the railway.
One operator, after being for years forced in this way to sell his
product to the Keith & Perry Company, or see his several plants stand
idle, has, in recent months, been obliged to build some seven miles of
railway in order to reach four different roads, and thus have a
fighting chance for cars, although all these railways are provided
with coal mines owned by the corporations or their officials.
In Arkansas, Jay Gould, or his railway company, own coal mines and the
coal is transported to the neighboring town at low rates, and there is
an ample supply of cars for such mines; but the owners of an adjoining
mine are forced to haul their coal some eighteen miles to the same
town in wagons, as the rates charged them over Mr. Gould's railway are
so high as to absorb the value of the coal at destination.
Not only are individuals thus oppressed, but for reasons which only
the initiated can fathom there are seemingly purposeless
discriminations against localities, as shown in the following extract
from the _Coal Trade Journal_ of March 25, 1891.
"Capt. Thomas H. Bates, before the railroad committee of the
Colorado Senate, said: The Grand River Coal & Coke Company
mine their coal in Garfield County, about fifty miles west
of Leadville, and all they sell in Denver, Colorado Springs,
and Pueblo, has to be hauled through Leadville. At Leadville
the individual consumer has to pay $7.00 per ton for this
coal, while in Denver, with an additional haul of 150 miles,
the coal from the same mines is delivered to the individual
consumer for $5.50 per ton. The Colorado Coal & Iron Company
produce all the anthracite coal sold in Colorado. It is
mined at Crested Butte, which is 150 miles nearer Leadville
than Denver, yet this coal is sold in Leadville for $9.00 to
the individual consumer, while the same coal is hauled 150
miles farther, and sold to the individual consumer for an
advance of twenty-five cents per ton over the Leadville
price, and is sold in Denver for $7.10 per ton in carload
lots."
With the government operating the railways, discriminations would
cease, as would individual and local oppression; and we may be sure
that an instant and absolute divorce would be decreed between railways
and their officials on one side, and commercial enterprises of every
name and kind on the other.
There are but three countries of any importance where the railways are
operated by corporations permitted to fix rates, as in all others the
government is the ultimate rate-making power: these are Great Britain,
Canada, and the United States; and while the British government
exercises a more effective control than we do, there are many and
oppressive discriminations, and complaints are loud and frequent, and
English farmers find it necessary to unite for the purpose of securing
protection from corporate oppression, as is shown by the following
from the Liverpool _Courier_ of January 29, 1891.
LANCASHIRE FARMERS AND RAILWAY RATES.
After the counsel given them yesterday by Mr. A. B. Forwood,
of Ormskirk, it may be expected that the Liverpool District
Farmers' Club will be on the watch for tangible evidence of
their grievances against the railway companies.... Under
certain circumstances competition operates to the advantage
of the public, and rival carriers are constrained to convey
goods from place to place at moderate charges; but where a
company is not held in check, the tendency is for rates to
advance. In many cases, too, special interests of the
companies are promoted at the expense of localities, and
even individuals are subjected to the wrong of preferential
charges. (There are no complaints in Britain that these
discriminations are practised for the purpose of enriching
the officials.) Hence the necessity for the Railway
Commission to regulate the magnates of the iron road, who
when left without restraint pay little regard to interests
other than those of their shareholders.
Although Mr. Acworth fails to mention this phase of English railway
administration, it would appear that the evils of discrimination are
common under corporate management in Great Britain, and that they are
inherent to and inseparable from such management; and that the
questions of rates, discriminations, and free traffic in fuel can be
satisfactorily adjusted only by national ownership, and if for no
other reasons such ownership is greatly to be desired.
The failure to furnish equipment to do the business of the tributary
country promptly is one of the greater evils of corporate
administration, enabling officials to practise most injurious and
oppressive forms of discrimination, and is one that neither federal
nor State commission pays much attention to. With national ownership a
sufficiency of cars would be provided. On many roads the funds that
should have been devoted to furnishing the needed equipment, and which
the corporations contracted to provide when they accepted their
charters, have been divided as construction profits or, as in the case
of the Santa Fe, Union Pacific, and many others, diverted to the
payment of unearned dividends, while the public suffers from this
failure to comply with charter obligations; yet Mr. Dillon informs us
that the citizen commits an impertinence when he inquires why contract
obligations, which are the express consideration for the exceptional
powers granted, are not performed.
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