of these cars resulted from riot. Wright says that from all that he
has been able to gather, he believes the reports of the railroads
manufacturing riots to have been true. [Footnote: "The Battles of
Labor": 122. In all, the railroad companies secured approximately
$22,000,000 from the public treasury in Pennsylvania as indemnity for
property destroyed during these "riots." In a subsequent chapter, the
corruption of the operation is described.] Vanderbilt acted with
greater wisdom than his fellow magnates. Adopting a conciliatory
stand, he averted a strike on his lines by restoring the old rate of
wages and by other mollifying measures.

He was now assailed from a different direction. The long gathering
anger and enmity of the various sections of the middle class against
the corporate wealth which had possessed itself of so dictatorial a
power, culminated in a manner as instructive as it was ineffective.

In New York State, the Legislature was prevailed upon, in 1879, to
appoint an investigating committee. Vanderbilt and other railroad
owners, and a multitude of complaining traders were haled up to give
testimony; the stock-jobbing transactions of Vanderbilt and Gould
were fully and tediously gone into, as also were the methods of the
railroads in favoring certain corporations and mercantile
establishments with secret preferential freight rates.

Not in the slightest did this long-drawn investigation have any
result calculated to break the power of the railroad owners, or their
predominant grip upon governmental functions.

The magnate class preferred to have no official inquiries; there was
always the annoying possibility that in some State or other