by William H. Vanderbilt, the richest capitalist in the United States. Gould and Sage were not to be deterred by the prospect; they had a plan by which they could force out Vanderbilt; it was none other than the species of blackmailing scheme which they had used to coerce the Kansas Pacific directors, a scheme which Vanderbilt himself had employed, and which competing capitalists had used against him.

This oft-used scheme of the day was the very simple one of building a competitive telegraph line. Again Gould came forward with the posture of being an "antagonist of monopolies"; sweetly did he discourse on the necessity of complete competition. It was at this time that Senator Vest minted his trenchant comment upon the professions of the money seekers, "When they speak they lie; when they are silent they are stealing," an epigram deserving of perpetuation.

Along the line of the Union Pacific Railroad and of their other railroads, Gould and Sage ordered the construction of a telegraph line, with the fixed purpose of compelling Vanderbilt either to buy or to sell. So seriously was the business of the Western Union Telegraph Company cut in upon, that, in self-protection, it was finally forced to buy Gould's competing line for about, it was understood, $10,000,000. Having pocketed this large sum wrenched from Vanderbilt and his associates, Gould then plunged in and took away their entire telegraph system. By every trick and art of Stock Exchange speculative methods, Gould forced down the price of Western Union stock, and gradually bought in quantities. To Vanderbilt's complete surprise and extreme mortification, Gould turned up in 1881 not only with a control of the Western Union, but also of the American Union Telegraph Company which he had sold to Vanderbilt but a short time previously.

THE MONEY ARISTOCRACY AND GOULD

Upon obtaining control of the Western Union Telegraph Company, Gould immediately increased its stock and kept on increasing it. Triumphant, gorged with spoils and power, Gould did not have to court the support of all that was considered solid and respectable among the money aristocracy. They knew him to be a great freebooter, and he knew their caliber, despite the exterior that they had woven about themselves. The instinct of kind for kind is unerring; which instinct in a money world is reinforced by that invariable principle of action whereby wealth-seekers rally around him who proves his supreme ability to get away with the plunder. The vanquished are expeditiously deserted; the successful flocked about. Such fellow kings of wealth as John Jacob Astor, J. Pierpont Morgan, Collis P. Huntington and others were among the noble array to be found in Gould's board of directors; a notable lot many, or all, of whom had pursued careers more or less paralleling Gould's; a sophisticated confraternity they comprised, fully and finely capable of understanding one another.

All were wary old stagers; Gould could not easily overreach them;

while all of them were not quite as astute as Sage, most were widely schooled in every devious tactic and ruse of financial and industrial warfare. Their safety lay in their lack of trust; the very reverse of the virtues they preached was developed by the necessities of their conflict. But when a credulous man, such as Cyrus W. Field, the originator of the submarine cable, stepped along with his confiding faith in Gould's friendship, spoliation and ruin were easy accomplishments. Field was simple enough to believe in Gould; only after Gould had mercilessly squeezed his wealth out of him, and had turned him adrift a bankrupt, did Field, too late, begin to realize that friendship had no place in the competitive whirligig. Field had little reason to whine over his misfortunes; the wealth that Gould tore from him was the product of a series of frauds in the results of which he was very willing to share.

GOULD SWEEPS IN ELEVATED RAILROADS

This fleecing of Field happened in Gould's thimble-rigging of elevated railroad stocks in New York City. No part whatever had Gould in the building of this elevated system; the franchises by which the roads were constructed and operated had been obtained by bribery. After other capitalists had done the bribing and had shown how profitable these elevated railroads were, Gould and Sage reached out for their ownership.

It was fairly well established before the Hepburn Legislative committee, in 1879, that about $650,000 had been expended in bribes to get the charter of one of these elevated companies, the Gilbert, later called the Metropolitan. Under examination, Jose F. Navarro, one of the officials of the company, testified that up to the time the building of this railroad was started, $650,000 had been spent. Questioned as to whether it had been expended at New York or at Albany (the seat of the Legislature) he replied that he did not know. It was quite clear from the interrogatories and answers that this $650,000 had been used as a corruption fund.16 Probably a similar sum had been used to get the franchise of the other elevated railroad, the New York.

The old device, so familiar in railroad building, of organizing a construction company, was employed in the building of the elevated railroads. A company called the New York Loan and Improvement Company was brought forth to carry on the work of construction. The same men were directors of both construction company and elevated railroad companies, and made contracts with themselves.17 Such capitalists and

16 Railroad Investigation of the State of New York, 1879, v:43. These franchises originated during the period of the Tweed regime. The New York Legislature was then being frequently corrupted. When the franchise for the Bleecker street and Fulton Ferry surface line, New York City, was obtained, $434,000 of its bonds were distributed gratuitously. (See "The History of Public Franchises in New York City, p. 121.)

17

Railroad Investigation of the State of New York, v:12.

"philanthropists" as George M. Pullman, John S. Kennedy 18 and others profited heavily from these transactions; they were, at the same time, reaping wealth elsewhere by many other methods of the same character. After the first two elevated railroads were built, a new scheme of plunder was conceived and carried out. A company called the Manhattan was chartered with a capital of $2,000,000, ostensibly to build elevated railways. But it did not build a single foot; the same clique in control of the New York Loan & Improvement Company turned up in control of the Manhattan, and they leased the two existing roads to the Manhattan. Little actual cash did this lease cost them; they illegally increased the Manhattan's capital stock from $2,000,000 to $13,000,000, which amount they divided as loot.19 By stockjogging methods Gould and Sage then crushed out most of the small stockholders, and secured control. They proceeded to water the stock still more, consolidate the whole system, and crowd out the more powerful stockholders.

FIELD THROWN OUT

Certain of the heavy stockholders, such as Field, stood in with Gould and Sage, but others bitterly fought the various fraudulent moves and expedients that Gould and Sage brought into play. The outcome of the ensuing legal contest could be forecasted. Gould seldom went into court without owning his judge. The judicial tool this time was Westbrook of the New York Supreme Court; when Gould had started out in his career of theft, Westbrook had been his first lawyer. Now as judge, Westbrook issued orders and injunctions backing up Gould's and Sage's fraudulent acts. His subservience was so notorious that he once held court in Gould's private office in the Western Union Telegraph Company's office and issued an injunction.20

After becoming absolute masters of the elevated railway systems in New York City Gould and Sage no longer had any use for Field. At the first opportunity the stock market was rigged to divest Field, and he was thrown out to linger and die a ruined man.

18 Of Pullman some facts have been brought out. Another example of his methods and standards at about this time may be instructive. After Jacob Sharp had bribed the New York City Board of Aldermen with $500,000 in cash, in 1884, to give Sharp a franchise for a surface railway on Broadway, the owners of the franchise issued $952,000 in stock and $2,500,000 in bonds for the construction of a railway only three miles in length, and the real cost of which was only $160,000. These bonds were unlawfully and dishonestly issued. Pullman knew that fact, and also of the bribery. In exchange for cars supplied by him, he received $150,000 of these bonds at fifty cents on the dollar.-See report of, and testimony before, the New York Senate Investigating Committee, "Senate Committee-Broadway Railroad, 1886" :181.

19 Railroad Investigation of the State of New York, 1879, v:6 and 7.

20 The New York State Assembly later impeached Judge Westbrook for malfeasance in office; but from the Senate, as trial body, he managed to get a verdict of acquittal.

Chapter XVI

THE SEQUENCE OF THE GOULD FORTUNE

WHAT was the concrete result, the grand culmination of Gould's fifteen years of plundering? He, himself, gave a demonstration when on March 13, 1882, he called in Sage and other associates and exhibited to them a box crammed with securities. Disparaging reports had been scattered in Wall street that he had been hard hit by recent declines in the stock market; and it was to belie these statements that he summoned in witnesses to attest by impressive proofs that his wealth and power were unaffected. He spread out $23,000,000 of Western Union stock; $12,000,ooo of Missouri Pacific stock, and $19,000,000 of other stocks. “There is not another man in America except Vanderbilt," observed Sage, "who could make such a display of stock as that." But the securities thus revealed were only a part of Gould's wealth; they did not include many other varieties. Two years later he ostentatiously made another and still larger display.

Those heaps of stocks and bonds were the legal tokens of this one man's far-reaching power. By their ownership he was vested not only with the mastery of the great inflowing revenues from numerous corporations, but the autocratic control over a vast army of wage workers. Every dollar of his fortune had been extracted by deceit, bribery, fraud and theft, yet here he was, one of the dominating magnates of the country, the owner of a ramification of properties, the dictator of the fate of tens of thousands of workingmen. Behind him, as an impregnable fortification, stood the Law, guaranteeing him the possession of that which he had seized by theft.

WARRED ON CAPITALIST AND WORKER ALIKE

But a few years back and Gould was buying law to escape law; and now here he was unbranded with the prison stigma, thanks to his money, and lording it over the nation. But ever there clung to him that same crass, indiscriminate brutality of method in dealing both with the power ful and the weak; just as he struck hard at competing capitalists, without timidity or mercy, so did he openly and candidly browbeat and terrorize his legions of workingmen. Of him it could not be said that he shrank from assailing the strong, while overawing the feeble. He warred on both capitalist and on labor, organized and unorganized, and did so with equal ferocity whether by involution or frontal onslaught. Gould was not

the politic sort of magnate who cut the pay of his workingmen, and then, as a solace, presented them with a toy philanthropy; he did not polish greed with hypocrisy. When he reduced the pay of the workers on his lines, he did it with a bold aggressiveness, daring them to challenge his power.

Few magnates, while in the very process of putting through some colossal fraud, had the hardihood to incite the resentment of their employees and of the people. They preferred to wait until the agitation over their individual frauds had been tempered by a certain lapse of time. Such a cautious policy on no occasion hindered Gould. During the very times when he was defrauding and bribing, he belligerently attacked his workers and compelled them to accept lower wages. What if a public outcry should go up? He had been menaced with many outbursts of fierce, withal futile, public indignation; they had not interfered with his accumulations; he viewed them with a cynical scorn.

In 1881 he and his clique were loaded down with spoils; the people had grown exceedingly restless, stung by their poverty, on the one hand, and contemplating the gigantic wealth of the capitalists on the other. Gould went ahead as if public protest were as nothing. He added, as we have seen, $13,000,000 of watered stock to the capital of the elevated railroads in New York city, and at the same time forced the agents and gatemen on those roads to submit to new terms. They had been complaining that they had to work from twelve to fifteen hours a day for the wretched pittance of $2 and $1.75 a day. Gould listened to their grievances, and conciliated them with an order reducing their day's work to twelve hours. But their visions of scanty triumph vanished when they learned that he had also cut their pay.

At the very time that he was looting the railroads in the West, he reduced the wages of the men on the Missouri Pacific and defied the labor unions, causing great strikes in 1885 and 1886, by which, however, his railroad workers gained virtually nothing. Most typical of the servility of many newspapers and politicians were the abuse and obloquy with which the labor leaders who conducted those strikes were overwhelmed. Let a man champion the cause of the oppressed, and no matter how lofty his ideals or noble his nature, he was at once subjected to an endless stream of ridicule and traducing. The servitors of the public press and the retainers of politics joined in a vicious persecution; Martin Irons, who managed the Missouri Pacific strike, was defamed, hounded and blacklisted. It was pitiful to see this man, one of the purest, best and self-sacrificing, precariously compelled in after years to sell peanuts for a living; and he now lies in an obscure grave, quite forgotten, while the remains of Gould repose in a spacious mausoleum.

REWARDED WITH POWER AND SPLENDOR

At forty-five years of age Gould possessed more than a hundred million dollars. He was prematurely old; his beard was streaked with gray,