338 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



States and nation, the class alone from which the judiciary is chosen 

 u retained," made comfortable in their income year in and year out, 

 without respect to the duties they perform or the offices they hold, 

 barring judicial positions, by the powerful transportation companies. 



We find citizens, officers, law-makers and judges overawed and 

 corrupted by a power that yields no adequate subjection to the powers 

 of the State. 



We find a public sentiment alarmed at this situation, but almost 

 despairing how to act helpfully. 



We find threats to deal with the matter summarily, and with pre- 

 cedents that it is the unexpected that happens, with knowledge of the 

 destroying power in human society of the ebullition of collected hu- 

 man passion, it is not the part of wisdom not to inquire into and to 

 be indifferent to these threats ; and such an inquiry is specially obliga- 

 tory in a popular government like that of the United States. 



The status of transportation whether it is an affair of commerce 

 or the body politic, or part of one and part of the other, and the ill 

 defined thought and the unpronounced action upon it marks the first 

 point of the difficulty. 



Second, we have had a strong leaning to it as purely a matter of 

 commerce. 



Third, in the presence of a sentiment that has at length reached 

 public conviction that it is partly at least an affair of the body politic, 

 has arisen an embarrassment of how to treat it as such. 



The embarrassment is greatly augmented in the fact that we are 

 under a dual government of local and general authority, between 

 which the lines are not clearly drawn, and which has been a burning 

 question of politics, and many believe may be again fanned into a 

 flame. 



The civil war was latterly an affair of sections of the country, but 

 the sentiment that led to it rested largely upon the question of local 

 or general, State or national Government, and many have hoped that 

 no serious point would ever arise again in this controversy. While the 

 railroad problem is not a matter wherein jealousy has been engendered 

 between the States and the General Government, it has been viewed in 

 the light of a matter between local and centralized authority and so 

 subject in some degree to the feeling or prejudice accentuated by the 

 war, that was anterior to it and that largely had its growth as a na- 

 tional issue in the desire of the South to protect the institution of slav- 

 ery. The result of that war was on the side of the General Govern- 

 ment as an issue of local and General Government, as well as in the 

 main issue, but on all sides the distaste is pronounced for more issues 

 partaking of this character. 



From the view that transportation, on the colossal scale on which 

 we have railroad transportation in this country, is in some measure a 

 matter of government, it is plain now, and seems as though it might 



