ARE RAILROADS PUBLIC ENEMIES? 147 



holders, and depreciating their own securities ; and should, since no 

 other offers, the railway companies themselves propose becoming their 

 own reformers, and so evolve the idea of pool commissions whereby 

 each company might yet live and enjoy the franchises the people had 

 given it when this new aspect presents itself, we say Mr. Hudson 

 shifts back to his original brief, and finds the railways once again the 

 rampant enemies of his corraled clients the people. But on taking up 

 his brief our unfortunate Mr. Hudson finds himself once more out of 

 court, confronted with the terrible truth that under the pool the rates 

 have not only been raised but have actually fallen below a legalized 

 minimum, and his occupation and standpoint again departed. A com- 

 parison of tariffs before and after the local pool systems existing at the 

 passage of the Interstate Commerce bill of course can not be attempted 

 here. But it will be found to correspond everywhere throughout the 

 country to the following figures taken at random. (Of course the tar- 

 iffs need not be compared with figures existing at the inception of rail- 

 roads, or at intervals of ten years since, because everybody knows 

 who knows anything, or who reflects upon the subject at all that the 

 history of the railway has been the history of the tariff reductions 

 upon every commodity, every product of human manufacture or yield 

 of Nature) : 



All the above being non-competitive or "short-haul" points (since 

 Kansas City, Denver, and Salt Lake can only be reached from Omaha 

 or the points Pittsburg or Altoona can only be reached from New York 

 by land transportation), there was no legal, certainly no natural, rea- 

 son (according to Mr. Hudson) why the mere technical fact of a pool 

 should have lowered rates. If, as Mr. Hudson asserts, railways are sel- 

 fish, grasping, lawless monopolies, enemies of the republic and devourers 

 of the people, there was, on the contrary, every reason why, when three 

 or four railways pooled their issues and monopolized all the possible 

 rail connections to that point, rates should be as high as,, if not higher 

 than before. Certainly there is no reason, legal or natural, why, to a 

 point like Altoona, among the mountains, to which but a single through 

 line has had the courage or the charter to climb (and that one, accord- 

 ing to Mr. Hudson, one of the most grasping of all his category of 

 grasping monopolies), freights should be lower after the organization 



* I take these last two quotations from Mr. E. P. Alexander's " Railway Practice ; its 

 Principles and Suggested Reforms reviewed," New York, 1887. 



