VOL. XXIV.

No. 1.

Another

Year.

The harvesting of the wheat crop beGreat Crop gan about the middle of June along the southern line of our vast cerealgrowing area. A splendid crop is reported from California, and the Kansas yield, if not so prodigious as had been hoped for in April, proves highly satisfactory. As the army of harvesters has moved steadily northward to the chief regions of spring-wheat production, it has become certain that the aggregate crop of this particular cereal would be the greatest in acreage, and probably in aggregate yield, in the entire history of the country. The weather of spring and early summer was not favorable to the growth of the maize crop, although the high price of corn in the market has this year induced farmers to plant more acres by far than ever before. It is too early to make any predictions or estimates about this year's production of corn; but it is likely that the wheat crop of the United States will exceed 700,000,000 bushels, and surpass that of the record year, 1898, which was about 675,000,000. Last year's (about 550,000,000 bushels) was the largest crop ever produced, except that of 1898. The reports of the Department of Agriculture at Washington have been watched with keen interest by the business world, and their favorable character has been reflected in a tone of renewed confidence all along the line. While American trade and industry have become so vast and varied that the agricultural conditions are no longer in any given year the supreme factor that they formerly were in the prosperity of the railroads and in the nation's business life at large, it remains true that farming is at the very basis of our wealth-production, and that a high average yield of the three great staple crops,-wheat, corn, and cotton,-must for years to come be regarded as the most important and vitalizing element in our economic life. And with the scientific methods that are coming into use, American farming has a better prospect before it than ever.

Prudent and careful management Prosperity and the Economic through a period of several years in Trend. which good crops and good prices have very generally prevailed, has wrought a marked transformation in the farming States of the Mississippi Valley. Mortgages have been so generally paid off that what was once the immense business of loaning Eastern money on Western farms has been almost entirely eliminated. The West itself has an ample amount of free capital; and nowadays when farmers wish to anticipate the future by borrowing money to make improvements they can find plenty of money in their own neighborhoods to be loaned at easy rates on good security. One result of these prevailing and favorable conditions of agriculture and business has been to dull the keen edge of popular interest in subjects related to the financial and industrial policy of the country. Great consolidations of railroad systems are going steadily forward under these prosperous conditions without exciting the amount of opposition from so-called antimonopolists that movements of a far less significant and even revolutionary character were accustomed to provoke only a few years ago. The Wall Street panic of the early part of May seems not to have disturbed the actual business life of the country to any extent whatever. checked for a time the spirit of wild speculation on the stock exchanges, and such a result was desirable rather than otherwise. More lately, the principal causes of speculative activity have been the reports that one railroad or another was about to be purchased for amalgamation with. some larger system. In our next number our readers may expect to find from one or more especially competent contributors a summing-up and review of what has actually taken place in the United States in the last two years in the direction of railroad consolidation. Each month, moreover, adds new chapters to the record. The re-making of the railroad map of America marks a great epoch in the history of transportation.

It

An Unprece

The year 1901 promises to surpass dented Trust- very greatly, indeed, the wonderful Making Season. record of 1899 in the matter of forming great combinations of capital. The so-called trusts of this year will probably average larger in the amount of their capitalization than those of last year or the year before. The average would, of course, be brought very high by the fact of the immense capitalization of the United States Steel Corporation, which is $1,100,000,000. The recent combinations have covered widely different fields. At Salt Lake City, for example, early in the year there came together a great number of cattleraisers, who formed the American Cattle Growers' Association. This we do not understand to be an outright consolidation of interests, but a union that might well lead in the future to a unified corporation. The pineapple-growers of Florida, in like manner, formed a combination for the sake of controlling the marketing and transportation of their product. In New England there has been a great consolidation of brickyards. In the South the Planters' Distributing Company, so called, has brought together sugar-cane interests. A great many flour mills in Pennsylvania and Maryland have come under unified control this year, and there have been several other recent combines that are concerned with the production of supplies of food, one of the important ones be-. ing that which is to control the greater part of the salmon fishing and canning industry. Among these combinations having to do with food sup. plies may be mentioned one to control the market

was

ing and price of eggs that come from the southwestern part of the country by way of Kansas City; another is a union of companies making oatmeal and other cereals; and another is a new packing, or meat supply combination, the Canadian salt industry also having been firmly consolidated. In March the American Can Company, commonly known as the tin can trust,' incorporated in New Jersey with a capital stock of $88,000,000. This corporation now controls a very great part of the business of making tin cans in all parts of the country. In coal-mining, in the electric and gas supply business, and in other enterprises of a local-service nature, it is scarcely necessary to say that the tendency toward consolidation goes steadily on throughout the coun try, and every month supplies new instances.

1901.

One of the most important new comSome Large Companies of binations is known as the machinery trust," its title being the AllisChalmers Company, formed about the beginning. of May with a capital stock of $50,000,000. The firms that have gone into this union were large manufacturers of steam-engines, mining machinery, and the like, and one object of the corporation is both to keep and to extend the foreign market that has been found for heavy American machinery, such as that needed by the mines in South Africa and other parts of the world formerly supplied, in general, from England. There seems to have been some delay in carrying out the plan of consolidating various shipyards, as mentioned in these pages a month or two ago, but it is understood that the project is not abandoned, and that it is to be taken up at an early day. Another very important movement relating to the future of American machinery is the new locomotive combine, of which Mr. Samuel R. Callaway is to be the head, and on account of which he has resigned from the presidency of the New York Central Railroad, to be succeeded by Mr. W. H. Newman, an active and successful railway administrator who comes to the New York Central from the presidency of the Lake Shore road. Mr. Callaway's American Locomotive Company has a capital of $50,000,000, and it includes, it is stated, most of the locomotive works of the country excepting the Baldwin works at Philadelphia and a company at Pittsburg. It is reported that several independent competitors of the Standard Oil Company in Ohio have surrendered and are to be absorbed in the great combination. It is also understood that much of the best of the new oil-producing property in Texas and elsewhere will pass into the hands of the Standard. The lighting companies of Cincinnati are said to be consolidating with a

companies of Philadelphia and Pittsburg, and to have a capitalization of $65,000,000. Tremendous excitement was caused in Philadelphia last month by the granting of franchises for the additional street railway lines on many miles of streets. According to the best public opinion, the local authorities made these grants with scandalous disregard of the interests of the taxpayers and the public treasury. Before the mayor had signed the ordinances conferring these grants, the Hon. John Wanamaker, by way of making his protest emphatic, offered to pay $2,500,000 for the privileges, depositing $250,000 as a guarantee of good faith. In a letter to the mayor, Mr. Wanamaker stated that the amount he was offering was only a fraction of what the franchises were really worth, although the city authorities were granting them to

MR. SAMUEL R. CALLAWAY. (President of American Locomotive Company.)

favored private interests without compensation. The mayor, however, signed the ordinances. The agitation in Philadelphia marks at least a great advance in public opinion. Neither in

Chicago nor in New York would it now be possible to do anything at all comparable with what the Philadelphia authorities have done, although eight or ten years ago exactly such transactions would have been perfectly easy in almost any city in the United States. Some of

us, indeed, who ten or fifteen years ago were trying to persuade the average American business man to believe that valuable municipal franchises were public assets, and ought not to be parted with except for a suitable consideration, were held up as dangerous characters seeking to instill principles of revolutionary socialism, or something worse, in the public mind. The people of the United States have learned a great deal in the past ten years, and these things are no longer a question of intelligence, but one of public morals. Philadelphia business men, for some reason which Philadelphians alone are competent to explain, do not take the effective interest in municipal finance and kindred topics that such bodies as the Chamber of Commerce and the Merchants' Association take in New York. And Boston now has a new record in these respects.

Where Are the Anti-Trust Leaders?

As we have already remarked, the new movement toward consolidation and the creation of great corporations has been going forward of late with almost none of that bitter antagonism toward it which was so manifest even a year ago. It is a striking fact that some of the most intense of the former anti-corporation leaders are themselves going actively into the company-promoting business. ExSenator Pettigrew, of South Dakota, is said to have been both active and successful in the stock market of late, and in various projects not precisely compatible with the position he had been understood to hold for some years toward the modern financial world. Mr. Towne, of Minnesota, who was the most prominent of

THE TAMMANY TIGER: "I am only an amateur compared with those Philadelphia fellows."

From the Herald (New York).

that particular industry. All these American developments continue to be looked upon in England and Germany with no small degree of consternation. Some of the foreign observers show true appreciation of the facts, and give wise counsel; others take a narrow and petty view.

Mr. Bryan's oratorical supporters, is out of politics, and is associated with such other great Bryan leaders as Governors McMillin of Tennessee and Hogg of Texas in promoting oil companies in the new Texas fields. It is said in various political quarters that Mayor Tom L. Johnson of Cleveland, Ohio, is the coming man in the Democratic party, and Mr. Johnson is himself a great street-railway man and company-promoter. One might have expected the huge steel company to arouse a great deal of public antagonism, but very little as yet can be discovered. It is not to be supposed that there will always be such smooth sailing for the corporations; but at present the skies are clear and the breezes are equable.

Iron and Steel Monopoly.

British Discus-,

For example, certain British interests sion of Ameri- have in the past month been making can Industry. a most violent attack upon the quality of the American locomotives supplied to railways in India; but such attacks will have very little effect, because the statements are so easily disproved. Until English firms can make and deliver promptly a type of locomotive that can fairly compete in quality and price, nothing will be gained by the policy of a concerted disparagement of the American article. A good many Englishmen, taking a more philosophical view of the situation, have already reconciled themselves to the fact that the United States is henceforth to surpass all other manufacturing nations, and they are calmly investing their money in the shares of the American industrial companies. Thus, there seems to be a large and steady demand in England for the stocks of the United States Steel Corporation. The great interest now felt abroad in American industry and finance was

There have been some further important movements in the iron and steel business, among which has been the purchase of a controlling interest in the Pennsylvania Steel Company on behalf of the Pennsylvania Railroad system, and the acquisition by Mr. Schwab, president of the great steel corporation, of the control of the steel plant at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Apart from the details of these two and some other transactions in the iron and steel world, which it may take some time to complete, it is only to be said that these latest steps have probably increased, rather than diminished, the prospect of stability and harmony in

MR. MORGAN AS THE NEW ATLAS. ATLAS: "Well, that takes a load off my shoulders, and how easily he seems to handle it!"

From the Journal (Minneapolis).

deal of money to maintain those standards, and it is not in practice at all difficult for men who have money-by making themselves useful to the Tory party and the Church of England-to break their way into the aristocracy. As gradually reconstituted under modern influences, the British aristocracy is rapidly becoming one based upon money. In America, where no class distinctions are recognized, money will not buy social consideration, other things being equal, nearly so readily as in England. Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Morgan being in London, and both of them prominent members of the New York Chamber of Commerce, the prevailing English idea was that all of the visiting American delegates were multi

MR. MORRIS K. JESUP.

(President of New York Chamber of Commerce, and
prominent in London last month.)

reflected in the attention that was shown to the members of the New York Chamber of Commerce who recently visited England on special invitation of the London Chamber of Commerce. They were received by the King and Queen at Windsor, and were gorgeously entertained by the Lord Mayor of London. Although they themselves are not aware of it, the English are far more materialistic in their views and aims than the Americans, and much more eager to get money. Their prevailing idea of the typical American business man is as inaccurate as possible. It is true that the titled aristocracy sets the standards in England; but it takes a great

MR. CHARLES T. YERKES.

(Who is to control underground transit in London.) millionaires; and the attention paid to them was by no means so much a mark of British affection for America as of England's natural and eager tribute to the power and desirability of money. The attentions that were shown to American business men could not disguise the real bitterness of feeling in various quarters in England on account of the immense progress of the United States as a manufacturing and trade competitor. One of the most notable American achievements abroad has been that of Mr. Charles T. Yerkes and his associates, who have succeeded in getting control of the district and metropolitan underground railroad systems of London, with a view to substituting electricity for steam, and thoroughly modernizing what have been wretchedly