“They represent as influential directors more than two hundred other companies. These companies operate nearly one-half of the railroad mileage of the United States. They are the great miners and carriers of coal. The leading telegraph system, the traction lines of New York, of Philadelphia, of Pittsburg, of Buffalo, of Chicago, and of Milwaukee, and one of the principal express companies, are represented in the board. This group includes also directors of five insurance companies, two of which have assets of seven hundred millions of dollars. In the Steel Board are men who speak for five banks and ten trust companies in New York City, including the First National, the National City, and the Bank of Commerce, the three greatest banks in the country, and the heads of important chains of financial institutions. Telephone, electric, real estate, cable, and publishing companies are represented there, and our greatest merchant sits at the board table. “What the individual wealth of these men is, it would be impossible and beside the point to estimate; but one of them, Mr. John D. Rockefeller, is generally estimated to be the richest individual in the world. But it is not the personal, but the representative, wealth of those men that makes the group extraordinary. They control corporations whose capitalisations aggregate more than nine billion dollars—an amount (if the capitalisations are real values) equal to about the combined public debts of Great Britain, France, and the United States. It is this concentration of power which is significant. There were at the time of the last statement sixty-nine thousand nine hundred and fifty-five stockholders in the Steel Corporation. But the control of this corporation is vested in twenty-four directors, and this board of directors is guided by the executive and finance committees, which in turn are largely directed by their chairmen, who are probably selected by the great banker who organised the corporation and in a large part sways its policy. “Examinations show that the concentration of control of these great New York City banks has gone so far that a comparatively small group of capitalists possesses the power to regulate the flow of credit in this country. In the last analysis it is found that there are actually only two main influences, and that these are centred in Mr. Morgan and Mr. Rockefeller. It is possible to express in approximate figures the extent of the Morgan influence”—which the writer shows in a table to figure up over six billion two hundred and sixty-eight million dollars. How very conservative is Mr. Pratt’s estimate is shown by the fact that he gives the number of holders of shares of the railroads of this country as nine hundred and fifty thousand persons; with which the reader may contrast the following editorial paragraph from a recent issue of the New York _Times_: