utilized it; who from the year 1795 on had bribed legislatures and
Congress to give them bank and other charters. Bribery had proved a
signal success. The performance was extended on a much wider scale,
with far greater results, and with an adroitness revealing that the
capitalist class had learned much by experience, not only in reaching
out for powers that the previous generation would not have dared to
grant, but in being able to make plastic to its own purposes the
electorate that believed itself to be the mainspring of political
power.


GRANTS TO CANAL CORPORATIONS.

The first great canal, built in response to the demands of the
commercial class, was the Erie Canal, completed in 1825. This
waterway was constructed at public expense, and was owned by New York
State. The commercial men could succeed in having it managed for
their purposes and profit, and the politicians could often extract
plunder from the successive contracts, but there was no opportunity
or possibility for the exercise of the usual capitalist methods of
fraudulent diversion of land, or of over-capitalization and
exorbitant rates with which to pay dividends on fictitious stock.

Very significantly, from about the very time when the Erie Canal was
finished, the era of the private canal company, financed by the
Government, began. One after another, canal companies came forward to
solicit public funds and land grants. These companies neither had any
capital of their own, nor was capital necessary. The machinery of
Government, both National and State, was used to supply them with
capital.