Pictured are the original front page and editorial. Let's see how many typos I make on my tiny new netbook keyboard...
Chicago Journal of Commerce.
Thursday, October 20, 1892.
THE PUBLIC BE ----.
We are living in an age of progress -- and cheek. The wonderful advances recently made in applied science has benefited mankind, almost incalculably. It has increase many fold the producing power of mankind and made many things "necessaries of life," which, but recently, were denominated luxuries to be enjoyed by the rich alone.
But these benefits have not been secured without loss to the people. Vast combinations of capital have built up monopolies and made the people pay an enormous tribute in the form of excessive prices. Not content with extorting money from the people, who, per fore, must be their patrons, these combinations assume and proceed to exercise privileges, which, fifty years ago, would not have been permitted for a single day. They calmly trample upon the rights of citizens, laugh at protests, and if pressed in the matter, buy a public official or a court of justice, and so maintain their position, ignoring at once the law and all sense of decency.
The Edison Company is one of the most conscienceless of all these offenders. The following letter, sent last Saturday, by one of the directors of the Society for the Prevention of Smoke to J. W. Doane, vice-president of the above named millionaire company, explains the situation:
"My Dear Sir: -- Last fall I met you at the Windsor Hotel, after your residence in Connecticut through the summer. You said to me that you dreaded to go back to Chicago an account of the dreadful smoke. Sitting in the office of the Society for the Prevention of Smoke at noon to-day, looking over the chimneys, I must say that Edison Company's chimneys throw out more smoke than all the other chimneys combined. I do hope that, as vice-President of that company, you will take it in hand. Myself and associates are spending a good deal of time to make you happy when you return from your summer trip by preventing the smoke. Now I hope you will come to our aid. Very Truly,
SAMUEL W. ALLERTON."
The Edison Company's two tall iron stacks are the most colossal smoke nuisances west of the Alleghany Mountains. They smoke day and night, and they pour out a volume of soot beside which the joint product of any score of the worst smoking plants left in town is as nothing. The smoke is always dense and black, sticky and sooty. Almost on a level with the stacks are the upper offices of the Home Insurance, the Insurance Exchange, the Woman's Temple, and the Rookery Buildings. Occupants of these offices are forced to keep windows close or breathe an aire thick with the filth of soft coal. Two or three blocks away the same thing is required of tenants in high buildings, when the wind is strong.
The Smoke Prevention Society has been untiring in its efforts to abate this most grievous and impudent of all the smut distributors of Chicago, and without avail. The offenders offer all kinds of flimsy excuses and keep right on defiling the air and injuring no end of fine goods and fine clothing with vast columns of smoke that would make old Vesuvius blush with envy.
The officials of the offending corporation claim that they have arranged to have smoke-consuming apparatus put into their plant and that some time in the future, all will be well. Let us trust that this is true. In the meantime, they continue to violate the law rather than go to the additional expense of burning anthracite coal, the use of which would at once abate the nuisance.
Why does the Edison Company take this defiant position? Why does it practically quote the words of Vanderbilt and suggest that the public may be damned, for all its officers and millionaire stockholders care? Simply because they posses enormous wealth and the power that wealth carries with it, and can afford, or think they can afford, to ignore and trample upon the rights of the public. And the probability is that the event will prove that they are correct in their position. A few suits will be brought and pressed by the company that is trying to abate the smoke nuisance, whereupon a representative of this soulless, grasping corporate offender will "see" the proper parties and the whole prosecution will end, as it began, in smoke.
"How long, Oh Lord," will the people submit to the power and insolence of combined wealth?