hundred proprietors. The modern trust movement has now absorbed
even our lumber and mineral lands, but in 1865 these rich
resources were parceled out among a multiplicity of owners: No
business has offered greater opportunities to the modern promoter
of combinations than our street railways. In 1865 most of our
large cities had their leisurely horse-car systems, yet
practically every avenue had its independent line. New York had
thirty separate companies engaged in the business of local
transportation. Indeed the Civil War period developed only one
corporation that could be described as a "trust" in the modern
sense. This was the Western Union Telegraph Company. Incredible
as it may seem, more than fifty companies, ten years before the
Civil War, were engaged in the business of transmitting
telegraphic messages. These companies had built their telegraph
lines precisely as the railroads had laid their tracks; that is,
independent lines were constructed connecting two given points.
It was inevitable, of course, that all these scattered lines
should come under a single control, for the public convenience
could not be served otherwise. This combination was effected a
few years before the War, when the Western Union Telegraph
Company, after a long and fierce contest, succeeded in absorbing
all its competitors. Similar forces were bringing together
certain continuous lines of railways, but the creation of huge
trunk systems had not yet taken place. How far our industrial era
is removed from that of fifty years ago is apparent when we
recall that the proposed capitalization of $15,000,000, caused by
the merging of the Boston and Worcester and the Western
railroads, was widely denounced as "monstrous" and as a
corrupting force that would destroy our Republican institutions.
Naturally this small-scale ownership was reflected in the