Here the other would generally admit that he was “stuck”; and Tommy Hinds would explain to him, and it was fun to see his eyes open. “If you were a Socialist,” the hotelkeeper would say, “you would understand that the power which really governs the United States today is the Railroad Trust. It is the Railroad Trust that runs your state government, wherever you live, and that runs the United States Senate. And all of the trusts that I have named are railroad trusts⁠—save only the Beef Trust! The Beef Trust has defied the railroads⁠—it is plundering them day by day through the Private Car; and so the public is roused to fury, and the papers clamor for action, and the government goes on the warpath! And you poor common people watch and applaud the job, and think it’s all done for you, and never dream that it is really the grand climax of the century-long battle of commercial competition⁠—the final death-grapple between the chiefs of the Beef Trust and Standard Oil, for the prize of the mastery and ownership of the United States of America!”