And your petitioners, as in duty bound, will ever pray. Monmouth County, New Jersey, January 1836 Address of Commodore R. F. Stockton to the People of New Jersey, in relation to the existing contracts between the State and the united Delaware and Raritan Canal and Camden and Amboy Railroad Companies, September 24, 1849. I have been from the first, and I am at this day, I believe, the largest stockholder of the united Delaware and Raritan Canal and the Camden and Railroad and Transportation Companies. . . . I have read the address and resolutions which the assembly calling themselves an anti-monopoly convention recently adopted in Trenton. . . . A great deal has been said in like phrases, by similar rhetoricians, about the somewhat extensive monopolies of property of other descriptions, particularly of a class of lords familiarly known in this State as landlords.
All property is held by contract.
It will be well for them to remember that it is as easy to put a firebrand to a dwelling-house or a barn as it is to put a pickaxe to a railroad. . . . It has been and shall be my constant aim and desire, as a stockholder and officer of the joint companies, to do whatever I can to meet the public wants and conform to the wishes of my fellow-citizens. . . . The fares and freights have both been put down to a point, as far as I can learn, satisfactory to the great mass of the people. It is our intent and desire to accommodate the people to the best of our ability. And we shall not fail to do so.