On the increasing mass of stocks and bonds, the issuing of which has occasioned this man's fortune, there have been paid, and are now being paid, great sums in dividends and interest charges.

Where do these dividends and interest charges come from and who pays them?

And now we reach the heart of the whole matter.

CHAPTER XII

THE TRUE DIMENSIONS OF A GREAT MONEY

MAKING MACHINE

I OFFER here for consideration two isolated facts:

1. At one o'clock on the morning of December I, 1906, three hundred armed men rode into Princeton, Ky., seized the night-watch, locked up the town's fire apparatus, and proceeded to burn two tobacco warehouses reported to be owned by or connected with the Tobacco Trust.*

*I should observe here that in behalf of the American Tobacco Company it is urged that the company had no interest in these warehouses, and that the raiding and burning of tobacco warehouses that disturbed Kentucky in the winter of 1907-1908 were not directed against the company, nor a result of anything the company had done. One of the burned warehouses at Princeton, according to this statement, "belonged to an Irish manufacturer named Gallagher, and one of them belonged to the Imperial Tobacco Company." To judge of the full rich humor of this remark we must return to a foregoing page and reread the account of the division of the world's territory between the American and English interests. And then we may well recall such despatches as this, sent out by the Associated press:

LOUISVILLE, Jan. 9.-Militiamen left to-day for Lebanon to protect the property of the American Tobacco Company, which has been threatened by night-riders.

While the fires were under way the armed men were drawn up in lines of defense about them and prevented any attempt to extinguish the flames. As soon as the warehouses were destroyed, the men released the watch and the fire apparatus and rode away. Three hundred thousand pounds of tobacco had been burned.

The men engaged in this outbreak of violence were not bandits nor ruffians; they were peaceful farmers. They did not desire wantonly to destroy property; they had been goaded by what they regarded as extortions and fraud against which they had no protection, to revenge themselves in the only way in their power upon the men that had oppressed them.

2. In April, 1907, Hermann Beck, a well-known retail tobacconist of Portland, Ore., having lost his once flourishing business, committed suicide. He had lost his business because he had been driven out of it by the Tobacco Trust.

The first of these incidents illustrates what the Trust has done for the producer; the second, what it has done for the retailer. The two being multiplied and extended indicate where the money has come from that paid the dividends and interest on the watered American Tobacco securities.

ness.

The United Cigar Stores Company, a branch of the Trust, has more than 500 retail cigar stores in the country (183 of them in New York City), and speaking roughly, each of these represents a former retailer that has been deprived of his busiThe method by which he has been deprived of it is one of the few operations of the Trust that have been visible to the eyes of the layman. It is a process that most observant persons must have seen or known of the little independent dealer overpowered and crushed by the big Trust store next door-but few are aware, I suppose, of the tragedies that are sometimes involved in the crushing. Some of the crushed dealers have been old men, whose one source of livelihood lay in their little shops. Some have been Civil War veterans, some have been for many years in the one place and the one trade, some have been cripples and invalids. All have gone the one way when the Trust started to capture their businesses. Sometimes the Trust has resorted to extreme measures to pull them down. It has induced their landlords to raise their rent to unendurable figures; it has bought the property they rented; very often it has pushed them to ruin by giving tobacco away or selling at prices that made competition impossible. A certain

dealer in Broadway, New York City, that has for years bravely resisted the Trust has been fought from two cigar stores adjoining him. For one of these the rental is $20,000 a year, which is said by one authority to be more than a year's total sales in that store. On the morning that this particular place opened, the man it was designed to crush walked into it and saw behind the counter four salesmen that had formerly been independent cigar dealers and had been driven out of business by the Trust. It was now using them to drive out others. Such as are young and active among the ruined tradesmen can usually find (for a time) employment with the Trust, employment at small salaries and under humiliating conditions. The older men shift for themselves or go to the poorhouse.

I do not know how many suicides like that of Hermann Beck have resulted from these operations. The remaining retailers say there have been many. Certainly Beck's is not the only case. The whole history of the development has been a story of cruel hardship. I will give one example.

Joseph Liebman kept for many years a cigar store at No. 264 West 125th Street, New York City. Agents of the Trust came to him about four years ago and told him that he had better re