Free The Great Pierpont Morgan by Frederick Lewis; Allen

difficult reorganization plan had been proved sound, who stood for mutual co-operation among the railroads rather than mutual destruction, and whose word could be relied upon, stood out like a rock of safety.
    One by one the managements of sick railroads came to him, as to a reliable doctor, for the financial surgery they needed. Presently he was deep in the reorganization plans of the Reading; and in the next few years he reorganized the Baltimore & Ohio, the Chesapeake & Ohio, and other lines. What matter that he was ignorant of the technical knowledge of railroading which it took railroad executives long years to master? In matters of life and death for the corporations which stood behind these executives, it was his word which counted most.
    3
    From Morgan’s successful peacemaking flowed other striking results. Within only a few weeks of the Corsair conference it became clear that the principle of co-operation was being eagerly embraced, not only by the Pennsylvania and the Central, but by the other trunk lines. The officers of these lines had often tried to agree among themselves notto cut rates, but their compacts had broken down. Now, however, there was a new feeling in the air that the owners and heads of the companies meant business, and freight rates and passenger fares began to rise from the low points to which harsh competition had driven them. By the following spring the Commercial & Financial Chronicle could cheerfully report that passenger fares between New York and Chicago, which as we have seen had got all the way down to seven dollars, had advanced to twenty dollars for first class and seventeen dollars for second class, “the final step in that restoration of rates which had its origin in the trunk line settlement of last summer.” And in the same conservative journal there was another announcement which reads somewhat oddly today:
    Anthracite Coal Combination —Representatives of the various coal companies met at the house of Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan this week, and informally decided to limit coal production and maintain prices. The new coal combination agrees to mine 33,500,000 tons of coal this year. Last year’s output was 31,600,000 tons. An advance of 25 cents a ton was made by the companies on the following day.…
    What had happened was that Morgan, having succeeded with one peace conference, had decided to try another one. The anthracite coal business was then almost wholly in the control of several railroad companies which served eastern Pennsylvania—the Reading, the Pennsylvania, the Lehigh Valley, the Delaware & Hudson, and others. Morgan wanted to do something to help the Reading, whose officers had been angry when he had stopped the project for the building of the South Pennsylvania line, which would have been a very handy adjunct to it. He was now reorganizing the Reading; what better way of showing his interest in its future than by a little peace conference on prices and production between the heads of all these coal-producing railroads—the meeting to be held, not on the Corsair , for it was March and the weather was unseasonable for yachting, but at his house? There was then no Sherman Anti-trust Law (a fact which explains the frankness of the news report); the agreementwas perfectly legal. But it was, of course, a competition-throttling, monopolistic move, and there was a loud public outcry. Said The New York Times , indignantly: “In plain language, this means … a tax upon an important commodity at the will of the combination.…”
    It is doubtful if Morgan saw much difference between ending railroad wars and ending competition in the coal industry. This, too, in his eyes, was co-operation in order that all might prosper.
    4
    Such agreements as Morgan’s peacemaking had encouraged were brittle at best. As Arthur Twining Hadley wrote years afterward, “Each [railroad] company is at the mercy of its agents. They will try to steal