112 TRANSPORTATION 



The argument that the community is naturally protected against 

 arbitrary exactions by the carrier, because any excessive charge will 

 kill the traffic, rests, moreover, upon a false assumption in part. 

 While freight rates may directly affect the volume of traffic, this is 

 not true of most high-grade commodities. 



The fourth objection which we have stated to freight rates as 

 made without governmental supervision and control consists in the 

 often infinitesimally small proportion of the total price which 

 transportation forms. The rate on clothing from New York to 

 Chicago by less than car-load lot being, say, 75 cents per hundred 

 pounds, a suit of clothes costs for freight perhaps from 7 to 10 cents. 

 The transportation cost for a silk dress for a similar haul of 1000 

 miles might be possibly 2 or 3 cents. These charges cannot approxi- 

 mately affect the volume of traffic if increased even by a large per- 

 centage. And therefore not affecting the volume of traffic, the 

 development of the territory served will not be affected, w r hile a direct 

 revenue to the carrier will materially result. We have said that 

 the territory served will not be affected; that is not, of course, true, 

 because in all probability the extra cost of carriage will be added 

 to the price of the goods; but supposing the rates qjre similarly 

 raised over the entire United States, no single community will be 

 affected, but the general cost of living for the whole country will 

 be raised. Practically a tax is laid upon the community by private 

 initiative without any power of supervision or control. 



Our final problem, then, involves the extension of governmental 

 supervision at the hands of an administrative board or a properly 

 constituted judicial tribunal. No domestic question before the 

 country is of greater significance, involving as it does the welfare 

 of practically every industrial and commercial establishment in the 

 country as well as every individual consumer of goods. The matter 

 is not settled by the enactment of the Elkins Amendment of 1903. 

 That law was granted because it contained something that the 

 carriers desired. The demand of the public for relief remains practi- 

 cally unanswered. Case after case before the Interstate Commerce 

 Commission remains unsettled either because of the refusal of the 

 carriers to conform to the decisions rendered, or because of pro- 

 longed and intolerable delay in the final adjudication by the courts. 

 Other countries have never hesitated to embark upon great social- 

 istic enterprises of popular ownership. In my judgment the only 

 way indefinitely to postpone an outcome of this sort, which is to be 

 deprecated in many respects, is that a compromise in the line of 

 more efficient control should be brought about. 



