WANTED A RAILWAY COURT OF LAST RESORT. 213 



yer, or to hundreds of others. I pointed out that, if rigidly en- 

 forced, the act would amount to a confiscation of private prop- 

 erty ; since, if the investment of private capital in any business 

 can be compelled to make charges for services in accordance with 

 a tariff not framed with any reference to the capital invested or 

 the value of the service rendered ; or if the value of services can 

 be estimated by the person served, and paid for only in accordance 

 with his estimate, and without hearing from the party perform- 

 ing the service, the value of private property invested in plants 

 used to render services to others than its owner would speedily 

 disappear. In other words, the principle upon which the Inter- 

 state Commerce Act appeared to me to proceed was one which, if 

 pronounced proper, would justify and if rigidly enforced might 

 even result in the operation of all railways by the Government. 

 But, however that policy might work in European countries, it 

 seemed to me impossible of other than despotic and ruinous appli- 

 cation in the United States with its five hundred railways, their 

 vast united capital and their enormous aggregate of fixed in- 

 debtedness held in the shape of negotiable securities, and very 

 largely held in England and upon the European continent. At 

 least it seemed to me impossible without a peremptory, and so a 

 paternal, fixing of values at which the Government should acquire 

 the railway road-beds and plants, not to mention the creation of a 

 tremendous civil list, which in itself would probably precipitate 

 the very evils and tyrannies which the socialists and alarmists 

 foresaw from the private ownership of railways, and the conse- 

 quent accumulation of occasional private fortunes beyond the 

 actual appreciation of services of the employments of capital. 



The Interstate Commerce Act has now been in operation about 

 four years. Its enforcement, so far from being rigid, has been 

 marked by extreme leniency and enlightened judgment upon the 

 part of the commission appointed to administer it a judgment 

 in which the echoes of public clamor or the verdicts of the market- 

 place have found no recognition ; and the result has been, it seems 

 to me, an entirely unforeseen situation one still more favorable 

 to the railway companies and charitable to their procedure, if 

 possible, than was the situation prior to the enactment of any In- 

 terstate Commerce law whatever. Before proceeding to demon- 

 strate a few of the anomalies of this, from my own standpoint, 

 entirely satisfactory condition of affairs, it is only fair to the rail- 

 way companies to state that they, immediately upon the appoint- 

 ment of the commission, began to enforce the most implicit 

 obedience to the letter of the Interstate Commerce law, and that 

 whatever diplomacy there may have been on their part it 

 has never resulted in the administration in a single case of the 

 penal processes with which the commission was empowered by 



