218 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



think no sooner has a national bankruptcy act expired or been 

 repealed, and the various State insolvency laws more or less taken 

 its place, than the public credit has felt the change unfavorably, 

 and the business interests of the community have clamored for 

 the re-enactment or rehabilitation of the national statute. Now, 

 if the Interstate Commerce Act stood alone, both the railway 

 companies and the people would know exactly what was expected 

 of each, independently and reciprocally. A codification of the 

 procedure thereunder would place the whole simply at every- 

 body's hand. The railway company would have no excuse for 

 disobedience, and the aggrieved shipper would have not only his 

 grievance but his remedy at his tongue's end. And not only 

 would the shipper have a right to prosecute the company for dis- 

 obedience or inadvertence or neglect or mistake, but the railway 

 company might proceed against a recalcitrant shipper to com- 

 pel him to obey the law : and this to the benefit not only of the 

 railway company, but of his co-shipper or neighbor, to the quiet- 

 ing of all possible railway " discrimination." 



If it is necessary in the present paper to demonstrate that as 

 the Federal law stands, and as all these State and Territorial laws 

 stand, neither of the great interests involved, neither the people 

 nor the railways, can know where they stand, either independently 

 or reciprocally, the demonstration is easily forthcoming. 



To outline it as briefly as possible : At the appearance upon 

 our statute-books of the act of Interstate Commerce, the art of 

 railroading, in spite of all and singular the State statutes (some 

 of them absolutely ridiculous, more of them unconstitutional, 

 arbitrary, and penal, and almost prohibitive, and almost all of 

 them inecpiitable to a large degree, as my prior papers have 

 perhaps demonstrated), was rapidly approaching the state of 

 an exact science. But, by the appearance of that act, this art or 

 science of railroading was arrested and thrown back upon itself 

 in a sort of " chaos by act of Congress." The enormous fixed or 

 mortgage debts of the American railways a large, perhaps the 

 largest part of which was held in Europe (where, to a degree 

 almost impossible to adequately describe to one not familiar with 

 these matters, it involved the national credit itself) had rendered 

 the pooling system imperative. This pooling system had not 

 been " sprung " by the railways upon the people, nor was it for 

 the benefit of higher rates, or in the nature of a combination 

 against trade, or of a "Trust." On the contrary, it had been 

 evolved slowly by long and costly experiments, and by extended 

 deliberation on the part of the railway companies, and had ex- 

 pedited an absolute cheapening of freights, and a consequent im- 

 petus to manufactures, the reclamation of waste lands to agri- 

 cultural purposes, and so had resulted in an unexampled and 



