220 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



form advance in freights. But this advance the people have felt 

 was a small enough price to pay for the principle of Federal 

 control of railways ; and, as I say, the railway companies have 

 acquiesced. 



But, while the situation is just at present satisfactory, and 

 while the railway companies, up to the present time, have been 

 able to " pull through/' it is impossible to deny that there is cause 

 for considerable uneasiness, and indeed for considerable positive 

 alarm, in the railway situation. It can not be too often repeated 

 that the enormous mortgage debt of our five hundred American 

 railway companies, averaging some fifteen thousand dollars per 

 mile for some 200,000 miles of railway, being largely held abroad 

 and payable in gold, most intricately and indissolubly controls 

 our national credit. It must not be for a moment forgotten that 

 the payment of the interest on this vast debt or loan is dependent 

 upon the earnings of all this mileage, and that, if the shipper can 

 not pay what the railway earns, this interest can not be paid. It 

 is for these reasons that the subject of a conflicting Federal and 

 State supervision of railways, and of their relations with the 

 people, is of popular interest, and deserves discussion in The 

 Popular Science Monthly, instead of being treated only in finan- 

 cial articles, which only reach the banker, the investor, and the 

 capitalist. Nay, more, the direct interest of the people in the 

 question of a collateral and possibly conflicting State and Federal 

 jurisdiction over railway companies is even more immediate 

 than as above outlined. Indeed, this direct popular interest can 

 be traced into so many channels, each one of them ramifying 

 into so many more, that one quite despairs of exhausting them 

 within the limits of a single paper. Some of the more important 

 of these channels may be, however, briefly indicated : 



First, it is directly to the public interest : to the interest of each 

 individual, capitalist, investor, or professional or working man, 

 bread-winner or consumer : that values should fluctuate as little 

 as possible, which is only another way of saying that capital 

 should always be able to find remunerative investment. But (as 

 shown before in these pages) if the capital now locked up in rail- 

 ways is not a remunerative investment, the next step is the rail- 

 way bankruptcy, the stock-" waterer," and the railway-wrecker. 

 Admitting, then, that the enormous fortunes, the accumulations 

 of vast resources in the hands of one or two individuals which 

 was the constant argument of our Mr. Hudson and his ilk, and 

 always is and always will be the argument of the communist and 

 the anarchist comes from stock-watering and railway-wrecking, 

 it is the direct popular interest that our railway companies should 

 earn their fixed charges. And to earn their fixed charges they 

 must first, as we have said, earn their operating expenses : and to 



