After furnishing a condensed history of the Reading Railroad Company, which was chartered in 1833, and opened to the coal regions in 1842—enlarging gradually from a line of fifty-eight miles of single track, in 1835, to over one thousand miles, in 1870—468 of these being in the coal fields alone—Mr. Gowen alluded, in fitting terms to the various trials the Company had had in the Legislature, while he was counsel, opposing franchises to other companies securing liberty to mine iron and coal. He succeeded, at one time, by an amendment, in preventing an act, in favor of an antagonistic corporation, having any operation in Schuylkill County. Then the Company bought up large quantities of coal land and had the Franklin Coal Company incorporated. This was followed by the strike of 1871, after which the Reading management determined to enter the field as coal and iron miners and obtain a grant from the Legislature for the formation of an auxiliary coal and iron corporation. This gave rise to the Laurel Run Improvement Company. They bought one hundred thousand acres of land, and it was conveyed to the Company. Forty millions of dollars were thus expended. Mr. Gowen subsequently traced, in brilliant and striking contrast, the respective positions of New York and Philadelphia, showing the benefits to be conferred upon Pennsylvania by preventing the grasping New York associations from obtaining a monopoly of the southern, as they had of the northern coal fields. The Reading Company, now that Mr. Gowen’s plans have succeeded, ships from the city of Philadelphia, alone, two millions five hundred thousand tons of coal a year, in vessels, has shipped as much as ninety thousand tons a week, and the commerce and prosperity of the port of Philadelphia, as a shipping point, are much more dependent upon the industry which it brings to it than upon all others put together. It can now say to the manufacturer: “Here is a Company that owns lines of railroad in the heart of a rich agricultural region, where labor is plenty and always will be abundant; we own the coal mines, and you can come here to locate your works, in the confidence that self-interest alone, and the worship of the almighty dollar—generally supposed to be implanted in the breast of a corporation, without regard to any benevolent or philanthropic ideas in the minds of the gentlemen connected with the Company—will induce us to let you have this fuel at less than you can buy it from an individual.”