zi6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



way companies, who are only persons (or at the most common 

 carriers in the eye of the common law), certainly they are entitled 

 as persons that statutes passed to regulate them as railway com- 

 panies should be definite, fixed, single, and certain. It is as abhor- 

 rent to justice that a corporation, or a railway corporation, as it is 

 that a natural person, should be compelled by law to act at his 

 peril. But the situation is exactly this : Anomalous and intoler- 

 able and abhorrent to justice as it may appear, our United States 

 railway companies are compelled by law to act at their peril. For 

 every single one of our forty-four sovereign States, and about all 

 of the Territories, have copious and dictatory statutes concerning 

 railways, and these statutes are in every case to be added to not 

 held appealable to or reconcilable with, but collaterally additional 

 to the Act of Interstate Commerce! And each governed and 

 regulated railway company must either select some course of pro- 

 cedure which shall contain some three or four, some larger or 

 smaller, groups of these State and Federal statutes, or else disobey 

 one or more groups of them at its peril ; or in almost every possible 

 case presented to it for its discretion institute suit for a construc- 

 tion of all these statutes in each particular case, and carry it to 

 the court of highest resort, the Supreme Court of the United States ! 

 Indeed it is only, as I have said, because the Interstate Commerce 

 Commission has thus far been composed of gentlemen and jurists 

 who have used the utmost personal judgment, conservatism, and 

 leniency in administering the statute, that every railway company 

 in the land has not been driven to one or the other of these pro- 

 cedures (and this not once but hundreds or thousands of times* 

 almost daily, in fact),viz., either to flatly disobey, or else to main- 

 tain a suit up to the Supreme Court of the United States. But 

 from the calmness and conservatism of a tribunal as once, at pres- 

 ent or at any one time constituted, unhappily no warrant for the 

 future or for any other time can be drawn. A change of personnel, 

 always possible, might ingraft or enforce a new policy at a mo- 

 ment's notice, with what results nobody could predicate or prophe- 

 sy. But one can always state that, in whatever form the result 

 came, it would amount to an interruption of public business and 

 of the course of commerce. 



Now, there are two remedies for this state of things : one of 

 which has been urged before, and by a no means inconsiderable or 

 thoughtless or turbulent or revolutionary element of the popula- 

 tion ; and the other of which has been certainly suggested, though 

 not, as I am aware, ever very seriously discussed. The first 

 remedy is the purchase and operation of the railways by the Gov- 

 ernment ; and the second is either the abolition of State railway 

 statutes and of State Boards of Railway Commissioners, or else the 

 making of the Federal Board of Interstate Commerce an appellate 



