Indeed, these bankers have not only received commissions for the underwritings of transactions accomplished, though illegal; they have received commissions also for merely _agreeing_ to underwrite a “great transaction” which the authorities would not permit to be _accomplished_. The $126,000,000 underwriting (that “single commitment on the part of bankers” to which J. P. Morgan & Co. refer as being called for by “the Attorney General’s approval of the Union Pacific settlement”) never became effective; because the Public Service Commission of California refused to approve the terms of settlement. But the Union Pacific, nevertheless, paid the Kuhn Loeb Syndicate a large underwriting fee for having been ready and willing “to serve,” should the opportunity arise: and another underwriting commission was paid when the Southern Pacific stock was finally distributed, with the approval of Attorney General McReynolds, under the Court’s decree. Thus the illegal purchase of Southern Pacific stock yielded directly four crops of commissions; two when it was acquired, and two when it was disposed of. And during the intervening period the illegally controlled Southern Pacific yielded many more commissions to the bankers. For the schedules filed with the Pujo Committee show that Kuhn, Loeb & Co. marketed, in addition to the Union Pacific securities above referred to, $334,000,000 of Southern Pacific and Central Pacific securities between 1903 and 1911. The aggregate amount of the commissions paid to these bankers in connection with Union Pacific-Southern Pacific transactions is not disclosed. It must have been very large; for not only were the transactions “great”; but the commissions were liberal. The Interstate Commerce Commission finds that bankers received about 5 per cent. on the purchase price for buying the first 750,000 shares of Southern Pacific stock; and the underwriting commission on the first $100,000,000 Union Pacific bonds issued to make that and other purchases was $5,000,000. How large the two underwriting commissions were which the Union Pacific paid in effecting the severance of this illegal merger, both the company and the bankers have declined to disclose. Furthermore the Interstate Commerce Commission showed, clearly, while investigating the Union Pacific’s purchase of the Chicago & Alton stock, that the bankers’ profits were by no means confined to commissions. THE BURLINGTON Such railroad combinations produce injury to the public far more serious than the heavy tax of bankers’ commissions and profits. For in nearly every case the absorption into a great system of a theretofore independent railroad has involved the loss of financial independence to some community, property or men, who thereby become subjects or satellites of the Money Trust. The passing of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, in 1901, to the Morgan associates, presents a striking example of this process.