The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1897-07-13
Controls Every Important Road
Entering the City.
COAL AND GOLD MINES
Every Industry in the Country
Pays Him Tribute.
Even the Ferries Are in His
Iron Grasp.

reorganizer by reaching out for control
of railroad traffic in the middle west.
Today. at a misery estimate. there are
over 10000 miles of railroad in this coun-
try over which he holds sway.
1t is not altogether the control of own
ership. No man living, save himself, can
tell what he owns. His fingers are in
everything, and every industry yielding
profits pays tribute to him. He controls
by organization. He sways the interests
of other men. He has been successful in
his enterprises as reorganizer and tink-
erer of railroads, and the stock of nearly
all of these corporations is absolutely at
his command. The figures which that
stock represents make a stupendous to-
tai.
The capital stocks thus represented foot
up 81, OF, 234, 259. The public debt of the
United States is 81, 7S5, 412. $40. 80. The Brit
ish national debt is about 49, 900, 900 600.
But it is not in figures alone that J.
Pierpont Morgan's influence is to be reck-
oned. He has branched out in recent
years, and now controls purchaser
the product of the principal gold mines of
the country. He has a firm grip the
coal mines through the railroads operat-
ing in the coal fields, and through these
same railroads Mr.. Morgan is practically
a toll-keeper of New York With unim-
portant exceptions. every railroad line
entering New York is under his domina-
tion-The New York Central, Erie, Lehigh
Valley, Chesapeake and Ohio, Reading,
New Haven, and, beyond them to the
west and south and the great northwest,
his iron track is plain and his dominion
appalling. His foot is on New England,
the Adirondacks, the Pacific coast and
the cotton fields and everglades of the
south. The ferries which connect New
York with the mainland and the west are
in his bag, most of them, not to mention
electric companies, whose millions are at
his beck and nod.
There never was a finer job of financial
doctoring that this shrewd physician did
when he injected life into the decrepit
Richmond Terminal, and built it into a
splendid structure, the Southern railway.
the arms of which reach out far over the
rich and yet-to-be-developed south. The
old Georgia Central and multitude of
laggard one-horse railways which had
lain more than half dead for years were
rounded up and the Morgan brand was
them all.
Besides cash payment of 81 100000. he
received lordly lump of stock, and here,
as in all other cases where he has
wrought, to prevent all interference with
his great plan of ultimate consolidation,
he established the voting trust" a po-
tent committee with himself a para
mount member, which should control
everybody else's stock. The other men,
bers of the committee were Charles Lam
cier and George F. Baker. In that body
there can be no Schism.
Then, there was the Erie, lame and
halt from the great buffeting, pulling and
hauling it had in the palmy days of Jay
Gould and Jim Fisk. Those two giants
controlled it. After F'isk's death Gould
lost his grip and for many a year the
road had a hand-tomouth existence.
When it was in advanced stages of the
down-at-the-heel state, Morgan took hold
of the property and came in with his re-
organization tonic.
1t was a patient worth saving. The
Erie coal properties represented 10000
acres of anthracite lands. $1,000 acres of
bituminous in fee simple and 1900 acres
held under mineral rights.
Morgan's far-seeing eye always has
been fixed on coal.
The coal roads, he said. so-called, have
been chief in his vast scheme of railroad
acquisition. By and by, at the same rate
of progress, he will be able to fix the
price on every bucket of coal sold to a
tenement dweller in this country.
The Erie has a short route from New
York to Buffalo, a route which splits up
the territory upon which the Pennsyl-
vanfa and Lackawanna draw for freights,
/
coal and iron of northern Pennsylvania.
He reorganized Erie on the voting
trust" principle. A deal of the stock and
more of the bonds held in England
by investors who have the most implicit
faith in Mr. Morgan.
In 1888 the banker took in hand the
Chesapeake and Ohio, and a fine inter-
mediate property it is, reaching out its
branches toward the south on one hand,
to join with his southern railroads; on
the west to yoke up with the Big Four,
which, too. looks to him as guardian, and
on the north invades the coal fields which
contain the fuel which makes the mills
and the steamboats, and locomotives go.
j So from all directions he has built up
direct through lines of transportation to
drag the riches of all those rich sections
and the vast territory beyond them to the
seaboard.
In the reorganized board Of directors of
the Chesapeake and Ohio Samuel
Spencer, president of the Southern rail-
way, a member of the Morgan firm; c. H.
Coster of the Morgan firm; Charles B.
Dickey of Brown Bros, representing min
GRITTY stockholders; George T. Gliss, an
Englishman, who enjoys Mr.. Morgan's
confidence, and then. Chauncey Depew.
There is a line of another of the Nor
gan interests, and giant it is-the New
York Central. Somehow very few people
have known that Morgan was the ruling
spirit in the Central. They thought it
was the property of the Vanderbilts.
Here is the matter in nutshell: Com
modore Vanderbilt, looking far ahead,
saw, in 1860. that it would be to his inter-
est to control the Lake Shore, the Michi-
gan Central and the Canada Southern.
With them he could throw the vast vol