With such legislation and contracts in hand, any syndicate could go to the banks and borrow at the lowest rates every cent of the millions it needed to carry out its plans. It need not invest a dollar of its own. Good enough "collateral" for borrowing would be this privilege--practically a capital of millions got from the government for nothing. Done for favored citizens, this is "the development of our national resources"; done for the whole people, it would be "socialism" or something more dreadful. Thus guaranteed dividends by the forced contributions of the American people, this company, if threatened with competition by other lines, old or new, can lower freights and fares to rates at which others cannot live. The subsidies are a reserve fund on which it can subsist while doing other business below cost. The vision of this will deter other capitalists from building vessels, as they have been frightened out of building tank-cars. The company can, by a war of rates, force the sale to it of such vessels as it wants out of the present Atlantic fleet. The scheme, which has progressed so smoothly through the various stages of the Postal Subsidy law--the exemption by special legislation of the two steamers from their foreign disabilities, the negotiation of the contracts for subsidies until A.D. 1905 for steamers yet unborn--is an entering wedge, the broad end of which may easily grow to be a monopoly of the transatlantic--and why not transpacific?--traffic and travel. And in future legislation, tariffs, and contracts, what bulwark of the people would avail against the Washington lobby of these combined syndicates of oil, natural gas, illuminating gas, coal, lead, linseed-oil, railroads, street-railroads, banks, ocean and lake steamships and whalebacks, iron and copper mines, steel mills, etc.? These beggars on horseback--the poor we will always have with us as long as we give such alms--are forever at the elbows of the secretaries, representatives, senators. The people who pay are at work in their fields, out of sight, scattered over thousands of miles.