A comprehensive survey of the United States, at the end of the
Civil War, would reveal a state of society which bears little
resemblance to that of today. Almost all those commonplace
fundamentals of existence, the things that contribute to our
bodily comfort while they vex us with economic and political
problems, had not yet made their appearance. The America of Civil
War days was a country without transcontinental railroads,
without telephones, without European cables, or wireless
stations, or automobiles, or electric lights, or sky-scrapers, or
million-dollar hotels, or trolley cars, or a thousand other
contrivances that today supply the conveniences and comforts of
what we call our American civilization. The cities of that
period, with their unsewered and unpaved streets, their dingy,
flickering gaslights, their ambling horse-cars, and their hideous
slums, seemed appropriate settings for the unformed social life
and the rough-and-ready political methods of American democracy.
The railroads, with their fragile iron rails, their little wheezy
locomotives, their wooden bridges, their unheated coaches, and
their kerosene lamps, fairly typified the prevailing frontier
business and economic organization. But only by talking with the
business leaders of that time could we have understood the
changes that have taken place in fifty years. For the most part
we speak a business language which our fathers and grandfathers
would not have comprehended. The word "trust" had not become
a part of their vocabulary; "restraint of trade" was a phrase
which only the antiquarian lawyer could have interpreted;
"interlocking directorates," "holding companies," "subsidiaries,"
"underwriting syndicates," and "community of interest"--all this
jargon of modern business would have signified nothing to our