Then the competitive roads had been enormously expensive to build. The projectors were compelled, when they proposed their enterprises, to bribe a large number of so-called capitalists to advance money which had doubtless been intrusted to them by laborers for investment. Such capitalists, having little they could call their own, must needs obtain it. So these railroad builders and their financiers placed side by side with the genuine million won from labor a false and pretended million which had its inception in and owed its existence to fraud. Then the true and false were made to pass together, with extended hands demanding of the toiler a portion of his product as their lawful dues. The one was just, the other a fiction and a sham. False stock, which never had any basis in labor; false bonds, which had no mission except to defraud labor of its product; false pretenses, which made it possible for knaves to live by their wits, were the excuses which capitalists put forth for those extortionate rates by which the people were impoverished. Our railroad represented no such presumptuous and dastardly pretensions. We came as labor should come to labor, asking no more and no less than labor’s honest dues. No stock, no bonds, no fraudulent construction companies came with us. We did not deal in dollars nor peddle securities. We had naught but labor to expend, and pretended nothing more. But we had all that labor makes and thousands of willing hands. When we built our road we offered it for use as the creature of labor and not the creature of capital. To build it and equip it we began at the very foundation. The ore we mined, and smelted it in our own furnaces. We fashioned our own plough and with it turned the furrow. We made the harrow and followed it afield. We planted the grain and when it ripened in the golden sun we harvested it with blades our own hands wrought. We delved again, and from the mines we brought the ore, and in the blazing furnaces we moulded the steel automata which, at our bidding, amid the Shoshone’s roar, reduced our wheat to flour, or wove the wool of our own flocks to cloth. Then we made rails of steel, and of the pulp of straw made paper ties, and threw up grades, or hewed our way through rock-ribbed hills. And so our road was built to Minnesota’s line and we proposed to build it through that state and onward to Chicago. It can be seen that our own road could, when completed, be operated far cheaper than any of the competitive class. We had our coal in Idaho at first cost; our iron at first cost; our steel rails, ties and all necessary equipments at first cost. No brokers or speculators intervened. Our railroad force wore clothing which we made, and no retailer exacted from our employe a profit. We fed him with our own home-grown and home-made flour, sugar, beef and supplies. How could the competitors compete with that?