FEDERAL RAILWAY REGULATION. 811 



is at bottom just, and in connecting it by experience and observa- 

 tion so as to determine its real limits and to prevent man from 

 seeing homicidal forces in every unexplained phenomenon of Na- 

 ture. This idea was also fraught with importance in regard to 

 forms of social life an importance so fundamental that a great 

 part of the work of primitive society was nothing but the prac- 

 tical development of this idea. The first form of social progress 

 which we find in the advance of human society is progress in 

 the manufacture of instruments of destruction spears, daggers, 

 knives, arrows, bows for among almost all primitive peoples it 

 is in their weapons that we first notice a wide differentiation and 

 variety of shape. There have been many races that had only 

 one form of house, very few articles of clothing or ornament, a 

 single kind of food, or nearly so none with but one kind of de- 

 structive weapon, a single form of knife, spear, bow. The capacity 

 for committing conscious murder upon other beings, of its own 

 or another species, has marked so fundamentally the superiority 

 of the human race over all other species of animals that in the 

 suggestions of this idea there have developed through long time 

 all the mental activities of the human race. This fundamental 

 idea was perhaps the first discovery of man, and ranks with 

 that of fire as among the fundamental discoveries of the history 

 of mankind ; and if human cruelty has been only too capable of 

 assuming forms infinitely richer and more varied than the simple 

 cruelty of animals, it is to this discovery that the fact is due. 



A DECADE IN FEDERAL RAILWAY REGULATION. 



By II. T. NEWCOMB. 



IT is ten years since public dissatisfaction with methods of rail- 

 way administration found legislative expression in the passage 

 of the Interstate Commerce Law, which was practically the first 

 attempt made by Congress to exercise, in relation to railway trans- 

 portation, its constitutional power to regulate commerce between 

 the several States. Whatever minor causes may have contrib- 

 uted to this dissatisfaction, there can be no doubt that the only 

 subject of disagreement between the railways and the general 

 public which constituted an at all adequate cause was the charges 

 exacted for the movement of passengers and property. While it 

 must be conceded that much of the complaint was unjust to the 

 railways and arose through the fact that, particularly in the more 

 exclusively agrarian sections of the country, much industry was 

 conducted at a loss that might have been shifted to railway cor- 

 porations could low enough charges for the movement of agri- 



