2i 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the act to, in its judgment, follow up a recalcitrant railway 

 company. 



The inventors of the act of Interstate Commerce designed it to 

 cheapen freights to the people by compelling railways to sharply 

 compete, and to relieve the country from what were claimed to be 

 discriminations, and to adjust local inequalities. They put the 

 act upon the statute-book. But by a strange deliverance of affairs 

 none of these objects were accomplished. No sooner did the act 

 become law than it operated to relieve the railways from competi- 

 tion, increased freights, and shifted, without lifting or adjusting, 

 what were called " discriminations." But, while powerless to ad- 

 vance the objects for which its projectors had fondly drafted 

 and urged it, the act did accomplish one great good and one not 

 local, as were the grievances, if any, it was framed to remedy, but 

 a national and general good, which it is needless to say its framers 

 and proponents never dreamed of subserving. That national 

 good was nothing less than the appreciating of American railway 

 securities in the European exchanges. 



I am not exactly certain that the railway companies them- 

 selves foresaw this result when they yielded so prompt and 

 unanimous an obedience to the Interstate Commerce Act, but it 

 is indisputable that this acquiescence and obedience brought 

 about this happy desideratum. It has not been unsuspected that, 

 just as the past few years have seen the " Trust " devised by capital 

 to meet and offset and checkmate the waste and unreasonableness 

 of the labor-unions, so the railway companies, upon finding the 

 popular opposition to them crystallizing into a Federal statute, 

 by a single coup turned the statute itself into an aegis, and made 

 it (as the old maxim says of the device of a mortgage) a shield as 

 well as a sword. But, however this may have been, the immediate 

 result was as I have said. The European investor, who had often 

 looked askance at American railway securities, because he had 

 somehow absorbed a notion that our United States railway com- 

 panies were more or less unregulated by statute, and so more or 

 less lawless, upon seeing them brought under Federal regulation 

 (always with his old-time ideas of the paternal and constabulary 

 benefits of government control), did not hesitate to bestow upon 

 our railway securities the confidence with which he already re- 

 garded our Government securities. As I have said, it is an open 

 question whether the railroad companies themselves foresaw this 

 result; but it remains another and a very curious cumulative 

 instance of how (as I have before noted) the Interstate Commerce 

 Act worked upon the railway companies, much as the prophet 

 Baalam is related to have worked upon the children of Israel. He 

 was employed to curse them, but he blessed them superlatively. 



But if the policy of Federal regulation of railroads is to be 



