AMERICAN PLUNDERERS.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume IV, Issue 846, 19 January 1883, Page 2

AMERICAN PLUNDERERS.

The New York correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald writes :—We look into the future, and see that many things which are now tolerated will sooner or later become absolutely intolerable. The greatest of these is the presence in our midst of men with fortunes such as have never been known before in human society, who display cynical indifference to the public interest. The great capitalists are practically at constant and perpetual feud with the community in which they live. They increase their wealth by every conceivable form of {gentlemanly roguery, and protect themselves by corruptly controlling the public Legislatures. Everyone knows this, and yet while, as at present, there is enough and to spare for all, the people at large do not care to engage in a crusade for the limitation in some way of the dangerous powers of enormous riches. Mr Vanderbilt, in the few years that have elapsed since the death of his father, has turned his hundred millions inheritance into four times that sum, and this vast fortune produces as much annual revenue as would double that amount invested in the public funds of Europe. The schoolboy is taught that Caesar’s speculations in Gaul during several years amounted to ten millions of our present money. Even the lesser of our two great luminaries, Mr Gould, has made more than that in six months by adroit manipulation of the stock market. Monopolies and rings are constantly being formed—and successfully—to reduce yet further the area in which the influences of an open market can be felt. Already coal, oil, bread, meat, matches, gas, and nearly all the other staple necessaries of life pay toll to such combinations. During the last month two more articles have been added to the list, fish and indiarubber. The latter is a curious instance of the power of evil to propagate itself over a constantly widening realm. The supply of manufactured rubber articles has long been regulated by a close union of two or three score of established producers. They have, however, tempered extortion with decency—owing mainly to the unwieldly size of the ring—and have only made us pay 10 or 20 per cent, above the natural price. The raw rubber has been collected in Central and South America, and has passed through the hands of a few great American and’ English houses. These latter conceived the idea of a “ corner ” —for a year or two at any rate —of the raw rubber market. Having secured all the possible sources of supply, they advanced the price more than 50 per cent, and the manufacturers, after consultation, have reluctantly consented to pay as required. But the latter talk now of establishing in the near future their own channels of supply, and as soon as that is done we shall, without doubt, see 4 the present “ corner ” created into the dignity of a permanent monopoly