This does not include the more than a billion dollars of life insurance funds they have sought and are seeking to acquire permanent control of.

Another reason for the present

opportunity, development and private effort. There is a disquieting influence in the popular view of the enormous fortunes of the present generation of Vanderbilts, Goulds, Harrimans and other railroad magnates, wholly acquired through the stealing of the people's franchises and the colossal watering of stocks and in some cases devoted entirely to uses that provoke popular disgust. These men and their predecessors, through stupendous agrarianism have succeeded in forcing a mortgage on the country equivalent to $27 a year on every $1,000 of property. The total taxation, federal, state, county, city, etc., is approximately $1,200,000,000. Twelve per

J. P. MORGAN

unrest is shown in the wave of resentment that has passed over the country affecting every community and arousing all classes of citizens. to a sense of the nation's extreme danger through the growing power of railroads and the illimitable ambition of the few unhesitating, masterful men who have conspired to deprive the people of the rights and powers of government; to force upon the country a bogus mortgage of eight billions of dollars of illegitimate and unreal value; to extract enormous, unnatural and ruinous tribute from every avenue of business and to absorb and put into their own pockets the results of all

J. D. ROCKEFELLER

cent. on eight billions of water in railroad stocks is $960,000,000. This bogus railroad mortgage was sure sooner or later to be met with stubborn resistance in some form and

the fast growing tendency toward government ownership is the first step in the direction of emancipation from the grasp of the giant railroad octopus. There are many men who believe that private con

place to Sphinx Ryan and his puppets, while Ulysses Rogers continues at the head of the secret service, issuing backstairs instructions and making new plans to defeat the people, seize their reserve resources and dispossess them from the earth. Doubtless the greatest menace to the country to-day is Thomas F. Ryan, a man who has no scruples that have ever been discovered and who possesses an overmastering greediness for money and power. Acts of his daily life from which most men would shrink are to his mind merely the legitimate means of business conquest. Το him all methods that tend to defeat

E. H. HARRIMAN

trol of so essential a public entity as railroads, under the best conditions, is bad in principle but in the hands of the present control is becoming wicked and beyond toleration. The railroads of the nation. of good right belong to the people and if those who are mismanaging them cannot be restrained they should be taken over and operated under government control, far removed from the zone of graft and acquisitiveness.

A shifting of forces is going on just now in the camp of the plutocrats. Colossus Rockefeller, on account of age and infirmity, is giving

THOMAS F. RYAN

public benefits and destroy public welfare are fair if they bring within his grasp greater control of affairs. He does not scruple to buy a life insurance company at a fabulous price if he can manage its mil

lions of assets to advance his various schemes to disencumber the people of their property and franchises. He does not hesitate to ruin a railroad company and bankrupt its stockholders in order to get possession of its lines and property for himself at a song. He delights in merging all the traction franchises and facilities of New York City, which he extracts from the people without pay, by political intrigue, for a thousand years, so that the citizens must pay to him the tribute he levies. It is an especially agreeable diversion to him to plan some new tyranny over the producing classes and make them dance to his harsh and dissonant tunes. He has developed himself into an acquiring trust to concentrate power in his handsthe power that is dear to him because it means still greater power and more money. It enables him to develop his vast plans and to reach out further and take more, so that those who are deprived, while feeling their loss, cannot understand who has injured them or how it was done. He possesses a kind of satanic humor that enables him to enjoy the bewilderment of his victims. He seems to take genuine delight in occasions that come to him to use really well-meaning and straightforward men in the execution of his schemes and to make them his unconscious accomplices. It is such a man who threatens by execrable devices to amass for himself money and property, by absorbing the traffic and the opportunities of the common people. It is not sur

prising that his zeal has carried. him beyond the bounds of toleration.

The emoluments and the power of the highly privileged monopolists increase with stunning rapidity. while the penuriousness of the helpless common people grows constantly more irritating and galling. The favored rich are getting richer; the poor are growing poorer. The rules of living prescribed by the money classes make existence harder and more onerous every day for the toilers. Their rents, taxes, interest, provisions, clothing, light and heat are made to cost them more than they can bear, yet they are abject victims of a merciless system that forbids participation in the just rewards of their labor and the property of their own creation.

I do not say that I approve of or even countenance socialism but it does seem to me to be part of the eternal fitness of things that if plutocrats take from the people property which rightfully belongs to them the people should take it back again and acquire the full benefits accruing from it. It does seem to me that if these confiscators who have built up a colossal money power upon a chimerical foundation without producing anything persist in centralizing opportunity and making life almost too costly to live, the multitude who toil and produce have a solemn duty to perform in taking this power from the oppressors and opening wide the doors of equal and untrammelled competitive exertion in the maintenance of the nation's prosperity and prestige.

such men for more than two centuries, but she breeds few of them indeed, now, and the time seems at hand when she will breed none.

THE NEW ENGLAND MAGAZINE

FOUNDED 1758

Is Cape Cod all right? To the begoggled, beveiled and bewitching. automobilists it is. To the lingerer on sunny sands and the bather in blue waters it is. But the Cape Cod of song and story, the nursery of the finest seamen the world has yet seen, is no more, nor does there seem any hope of a joyous resurrection.

A study of statistical figures shows the decline of the Cape to be something startling, in the last half century. In 1855 Barnstable County, which is the Cape, had a total population of 35,442; in 1860 this had increased a bit, to 35,996; in 1900 it was reckoned only 27,826 - these from census reports. In other words, while the total population of the country and the state, and par

AN automobile party flashed into

a Cape Cod town the other day, each ponderous machine swinging through the dust of its predecessor into line in the square. A wellgroomed man rose in the foremost and propounded the query, "What's the matter with Cape Cod?" and in a score of well-modulated voices came the answering shout, "Cape Cod's all right." Then the engines barked, gongs sounded and the fashionable throng disappeared, flashing along the way Bostonward, leaving behind mingled memories of violets and gasolene. Time was when that answering shout might have been echoed by thousands of broad-chested Yankee seamen, in voices hoarse with breathing the gales of the world. Cape Cod bred

state, has increased very materially in the last forty years, that of the Cape, which is a portion of this eastern section, has declined practically a fourth.

This alone is enough to mark a serious decline in any community, for,

"Ill fares that land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates and men decay."

Nor has wealth accumulated on the Cape. Its former thriving industries have left it, both by land and by sea. Many of these were perhaps of no great importance to the nation, though they were of vast importance to the Cape; but one at least, the training of hardy seamen, was of inestimable value to the country at large; this, too, is no longer to be found. A further study

of statistics shows some startling figures in this regard. In 1855 there were one hundred and sixty-eight salt manufactories on the Cape, representing an invested capital of $100,000. One of these is reported as still existing and making a little salt. In 1855 there were tanneries on the Cape, and woolen goods were manufactured in considerable quantity, while the making of boots and. shoes was carried on quite extensively. All these have passed, but need not cause particular regret because the work is being done elsewhere, perhaps to better advantage. But the one thing which the Cape did better than any other portion of the country, and which can ill afford to be lost, was the training and trying out of hardy seamen. American seamen were a half century ago the pride of the world. To-day you can hardly find them afloat. Probably Probably in the good old days not all of them came from Cape Cod, but a good portion of them did, and wherever they trod a deck they were guide and exemplar for their shipmates.

What has become of them? Well, for the old-timers the answer is easy.

You have but to search the little graveyards of the foreign ports of the world. You will find Cape Cod seamen buried in every one. You have but to ask the sea where the white crest of the surges is the only headstone for alas! too many of them. Yet most of them after all came home to Cape Cod to die, and if you drive from one end of the Cape to the other you will note that Cape Cod's graveyards hold far more of her seamen than her ships, or any ships, do to-day. The churches of the old time still stand on the bleak sandy headlands, huge structures some of them, large

enough to hold mighty congregations. The people that once filled them lie in the graveyards which surround them, with quaint headstones and quainter epitaphs over them, and the churches they once filled are closed or minister to scant congregations.

In 1855, to go back to our figures again, Provincetown had a whaling fleet of seventeen whaling ships, ninety-seven vessels engaged in the cod and mackerel fisheries, the whole employing 873 men and representing a capital of $450,000. In 1865 this had increased to twentyeight whale ships and 105 fishing vessels, employing a total of 1260 men and increasing the capital employed to $626,262.

In 1865 Dennis had a fishing fleet of forty-eight vessels employing 722 men and $117,000 capital and a coastwise fleet of eighty-five representing $401,400 and 445 more men. Nearly 1200 seamen sailed from this one Cape Cod town whence to-day not a ship hails. Wellfleet had eighty fishing vessels and 824 fishermen in 1855. Yarmouth had fifteen vessels and 170 men, and so the story goes, all up and down the sandy "right arm of Massachusetts."

In all, Barnstable County had in 1855 twenty-four whale-ships and 357 fishing vessels sailing the seas with 3849 seamen aboard, enough to man the whole United States navy when the civil war broke out, and man it with the best seamen in the world. This enumeration does not count the deep water sailors who were on every clipper ship that sailed the sea, and many of them in command.

In the years that have followed that date Cape Cod seamen have fallen upon evil days. Though