TRANSPORTATION THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. 339 



have been plain at any time, that it is too wide in its scope to be 

 treated successfully by the local State governments. There are two 

 divisions to the subject from the national standpoint : 



The position of the Government toward it as defined by the Con- 

 stitution. 



The general ground on which governmental action stands, making 

 it necessary. Of what that action should be, this paper does not aim 

 to treat. 



1. The language of the Constitution pertaining to the subject is, 

 " Congress shall have power to regulate commerce with foreign na- 

 tions, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes." 



Applying this to railroads, the interpretation commonly made is 

 that where a railroad company's chief means of transportation, that is 

 its tracks, extend from one State into another, such railroad company 

 comes constitutionally under the regulation of Congress. The fram- 

 ers of the Constitution certainly had no intention pertaining to trans- 

 portation in its present form that helps us to interpret this clause of 

 the instrument which they drew ; their intention only pertained to the 

 wider generalization commerce, and must have been suggested by 

 arrangements ordinarily entered into by adjoining States that had no 

 Federal bond. Such arrangements were chiefly treaties. Hence the 

 Constitution debars commercial treaties between States. 



" Commerce among the States " is immensely wider in its scope 

 than the mere transference of commodities or passengers over the line 

 of adjoining States. Any railroad or other transportation company 

 that enters into an arrangement with another transportation company 

 for the movement of commodities or passengers from one part of the 

 country to another (and this can not be done except by traversing dif- 

 ferent States) is a participant in commerce among the States, and so 

 amenable to the clause of the Constitution covering such an act. To 

 claim that a transportation company must actually perform the act of 

 transference from one State into another is standing on the narrowest 

 technical ground, and stands in a very subordinate and unimportant re- 

 lation to the vital functions of commerce, and would be a poor thing 

 to rest an important relation upon. The company that receipts for 

 property, or sells tickets to passengers, to go out of the State in which 

 these acts are performed, or which delivers property and accepts pay 

 for the transportation of such, which came from other transportation 

 companies and from other States, and which honors tickets for pas- 

 sengers sold by other companies in other States, certainly participates 

 in commerce among the States whether its own property and track is 

 wholly located in one State or not. 



2. The special surprise that has taken place in regard to railroad 

 transportation, outside of its mechanical effects (and this is true of 

 other forms of transportation), is the tendency to centralization of 

 management of interests that at the outset appeared to have no special 



