WANTED A RAILWAY COURT OF LAST RESORT. 219 



promised a still more enlarged prosperity. Not only was it 

 found impossible for the moment to equate rates, or to know 

 what to charge the public for railway service, but among the 

 railway companies themselves it was impossible to contract or 

 hold each other to their agreements, covenants, or mutual obliga- 

 tions. Moreover, every or any insignificant local railway in the 

 land (of five or ten miles long, or even of less) might and did 

 solicit and accept freight to any point in the United States, 

 Canada, or Mexico at arbitrary rates deliver the freight at the 

 end of its haul to other, and this to yet other, lines so finally 

 forwarding that freight to its destination at a rate absolutely 

 prohibitive to a trunk line extending directly from the shipping 

 to the destinative point of that very freight ; and this from mo- 

 tives, not of competition, but of, say, jealousy, or looking to the 

 depreciation of securities, and so of ultimate absorption, or con- 

 trol, or " wrecking " of the trunk line. Into this confusion stepped 

 the State railway boards, each lending a hand, until for a time it 

 seemed as if the business of railroading was about the most un- 

 desirable and unprofitable of employments not only, but a sort of 

 punishment in itself. In short, it was as a last gasp, or a forlorn 

 hope, that the railway companies, to save themselves, invented 

 " pools/' and begged acquiescence in them of the short local lines 

 in the hope of being able to earn their operating expenses, and 

 possibly a prophetic fraction of their fixed charges. Imagine 

 their consternation at an act of Congress which appeared and 

 prohibited pooling ! 



What the railway companies or the national credit would have 

 done, had it not been for the first important decision of the Inter- 

 state Commerce Commission (known as the Louisville and Nash- 

 ville decision), it is impossible to conjecture. That decision, 

 coming at the right time, declared that, while the text of the act 

 forbade " pools " or " discriminations," or " the charging more for 

 a short than a long haul," the spirit of the act was to do the rail- 

 way companies as well as the shippers justice under the circum- 

 stances of each case. In short, that circumstances must control. 



Under, I say, that benign decision, the railways have been 

 able to exist and to prosper and pay their fixed charges. The 

 " Gentlemen's Agreement " nothing more or less than a series of 

 " pools," called " associations " only created by a sort of national 

 instead of local consent (that is, by the principal railways acting 

 as a unit instead of by groups of railways here and there grouped 

 by local or competitive considerations), has enabled the interest 

 on American railway securities to be met abroad, and so the 

 national credit maintained in the sensitive European markets, 

 and all for the time has been well. The expense, to be sure, has 

 been borne by the people the shippers. There has been a uni- 



