296 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Railroads have enemies within as well as without. Intense compe- 

 tition has given birth to a class of soliciting freight agents, to whom 

 reference has already been made ; these men are empowered to grant 

 reduced rates at discretion ; their bargains are binding on all the lines 

 forming the routes for which they solicit business, and their acts are 

 in their nature so difficult of detection, and so inimical to the integrity 

 of agreements, that a sound business policy would dictate that their 

 powers should only be wielded by officers of the roads sufficiently 

 high in position and character to guarantee good faith in carrying out 

 the joint contracts made by the presidents of the lines. 



It is a strange fact in railroad history that the contracts between 

 roads for the maintenance of rates have never, up to the present time, 

 invoked legal sanction and enforcement; they have been made and 

 broken purely at will. Good authorities, among whom may be named 

 the Railroad Commissioners of Massachusetts, state that the existing 

 laws of the country afford all the provisions needed for the purpose ; 

 while, again, the chief railroad expert in the country, Mr. Fink, holds 

 that special legislation is necessary. So important does Mr. Fink hold 

 this matter to be, that he states that when the necessary enactments 

 have been passed, and when railroad managers have the good sense to 

 co-operate and avail themselves of legal authority, he will regard the 

 railroad problem solved as far as solution is possible. 



In March, 1882, a commission at Washington, appointed to con- 

 sider the railway question, brought together Mr. Fink and General 

 Reagan, of Texas, the member of Congress who proposed a bill for 

 the direct regulation of the railroads by the Federal Government. 

 General Reagan's bill is chiefly aimed at what he and many others 

 conceive to be a grave injustice, namely, the discrimination which 

 makes through freight pay a much less rate than local freight, and 

 which grants one shipper more favorable terms than another for the 

 same service. The bill would make the rate per mile uniform over all 

 roads, and would make through rates the sum of the local rates 

 charged over the component parts of a line. The testimony of Mr. 

 Fink before the commission, and particularly in reply to General Rea- 

 gan, is one of the most instructive pieces of railway literature so far 

 given to the public. Mr. Fink deemed the railroad problem too diffi- 

 cult to be handled by a directly appointed commission : all that he 

 could recommend was a commission to investigate complaints. He 

 pointed out the great services railroads had done the country, and de- 

 clared the evils attending the management of the business to be largely 

 unavoidable amid affairs so vast and involved. As an example of the 

 benefits railroads had conferred upon the public, he stated that in the 

 fall of 1880 the rate from Chicago to the East was but six tenths of 

 one cent per ton per mile, or equal to carrying seventeen barrels of 

 flour one mile for one cent ! The intense competition between roads 

 has been one of the main causes of the remarkable economy of their 



