TRANSPORTATION 



to control. The railroads are conceded the right of transportation; 

 thus they gain a certain monopoly, which is counterbalanced by 

 a number of obligations: The obligation of transportation to every- 

 body; the recognition of the state's right to exert its influence upon 

 the rates of transportation; the duty to establish uniform conditions 

 of transportation, hence prohibition of arbitrary preference of certain 

 shippers; the duty to introduce uniform institutions of transpor- 

 tation; the duty to permit other lines to be connected, etc. Not 

 all, but most states of Europe, have regulated upon this basis their 

 relations to the railroads; also those which have not deducted 

 consequences from the right of railroad supremacy of the state in 

 all points mentioned, have done so at least in several points. Con- 

 sidering this far-going regulation of the private operation of rail- 

 roads, the acquisition of the railroads by the state seems to be the 

 next step; by far the majority of all states have already adopted the 

 idea of a railroad system of the state. 1 



The public right of the railway cannot be treated without referring 

 to its economic and generally cultural importance. The measure 

 of economic liberty w^hich the state leaves to the enterprises, the 

 limit which it puts to its influence, will always be defined the concep- 

 tion of free competition, private monopolies, the principles of the 

 formation of price in free and in regulated transportation of the 

 economic and social function of the state. 



It lies in the nature of institutions of transportation that they 

 obliterate the boundaries of historical and national peculiarities, as 

 they connect the nations in spite of all differences of nature and of 

 their striving for power; thus they " create a universal image of 

 the world which could not be possible without them, for which his- 



1 Cf. Keller, Der Staatsbahngedanke bei den verschiedcnen Volkern, Aaran, 1897. 

 That the principle of the supremacy of the state is generally recognized is 

 expressly pronounced by Emery R. Johnson, American Railway Transportation, 

 New York, 1903, p. 322. He declares that transportation is a public duty and 

 it is the duty of the government to regulate it. He quotes several very interest- 

 ing decisions of the United States Supreme Court in which also this principle is 

 recognized: " Whether the use of a railroad is a private one depends in no measure 

 upon the question \vho constructed it or who owns it. It has never been con- 

 sidered a matter of any importance that the road was built by the agency of 

 a private corporation. No matter who is the agent, the function performed is 

 that of the state. Though the ownership is private, the use is public." Also by 

 other authors the general political importance of the railroads in America is 

 fully recognized. K. H. White, History of the Pacific Railway, Chicago, 1895, 

 p. 7, mentions the approval of the first sketch of an Atlantic-Pacific railway by 

 the Street and Canal Commission of the Congress of the United States in 1850. 

 " Such a railway will connect more closely the eastern and western states in eco- 

 nomic, social, and political regard. It will become a road of commerce from 

 Europe to Asia. It will further universal peace and transfer a part of England's 

 commercial importance to the United States." In 1870 Charles F. Adams 

 writes in the North American Review (1870, I, p. 125): " Our railway system, 

 connected through the sentiment of equal interests and equal dangers, will once 

 exert the same great influence as the Roman Catholic Church, although it will 

 possess, instead of the religious and moral dominion only, the mighty influence 

 which the desire for material development bestows upon it, which it serves so 

 effectively." 



