146 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



mere replica of the schoolboy fallacy : Food is necessary to life : Corn 

 is food ; ergo, corn is necessary to life (in which the undistributed mid- 

 dle is supposed to elude the urchin logician), and are altogether beside 

 adult discussion of economical questions. But let Mr. Hudson's pro- 

 cesses be waived while we address ourselves to the material of the 

 charges he pastes and I assume that he pastes them correctly in his 

 scrap-book : 



I. The Long and Short Haul. There certainly never arose in 

 practical railway operation a situation wherein a railway company was 

 solicitous to charge less money for doing more work and to pay its own 

 expenses meanwhile. But in practical railway policy a difference be- 

 tween the cost and the value of certain business to the company might, 

 and sometimes does, arise which appeals to the company's instinct of 

 self-preservation too despotically to be disregarded. A railway com- 

 pany, which has for long years acceptably served its local and through 

 patrons, finds itself suddenly paralleled by a rival company, serving all 

 or some of the same localities not only, but prepared as a part of its 

 (the second comer's) investment to undergo the expense of "cutting" 

 rates, and so to supplant the first comer by offering to take business 

 for less than the actual expense of doing it, even though some of the 

 competing points are farther distant from the common terminals of 

 the paralleled line than the actual length of the roads. Under such 

 circumstances, the value of all of its original business it could retain 

 would be clearly of more value to the first company than the then 

 present cost of doing it : and the result would, of course, by every law 

 of human economy or of human nature, be that the first company 

 would either anticipate or respond to the " cut." The effect in either 

 case would be to cheapen tariffs to the shipper to the people. But 

 Mr. Hudson, at this moment, does not care for the people. Later on 

 he will take up the cudgels for them, but just now he kindly holds a 

 brief for the railroads. He thinks it shameful that deserving and 

 hard-working railroads should be obliged to take long hauls for actu- 

 ally less than they are legally entitled to charge for short hauls for 

 much smaller distances. Mr. Hudson has no objection, of course, to 

 one of his fellow-countrymen riding from New York to Chicago for 

 five dollars, or shipping livestock from Toledo to Buffalo at one dollar 

 a car-load during a railway war. (Or, if he should still remember the 

 poor public, it will be not the poor public who ride a thousand miles 

 for five dollars, or at the rate of half a cent a mile, but the poor public 

 who commonly ride one hundred and sixty-seven miles for five dollars, 

 thereby being compelled to either walk or pay the legal mileage of 

 three cents which the company is allowed by law to charge.) But 

 should the railway companies find that carrying passengers from New 

 York to Chicago for five dollars, or cattle from Toledo to Buffalo at 

 one dollar a car-load does not pay that by making such rates they 

 are robbing not the public at large, perhaps, but their own stock- 



