THE SUCCESSOR OF THE RAILWAY. 755 



jestic American railway systems * for the benefit of its alien paral- 

 lel, and which has precipitated three other vast plants into the 

 miseries of receiverships! Will she who has come so swiftly 

 into potent plutocracy, who pays dividends and fills pockets of all 

 concerned, fall at last, as most men and women fall, by her own 

 ambition and insatiate pride of power ? Perhaps she can climb 

 over the Interstate Commerce Commission and State boards of 

 railway Solons above enumerated as deftly as she surmounts 

 grades and laughs at incorporation and locating expenses ! Let 

 us hope, for her sake, that she does so. But possibly she can not 

 expect, after dissolving the street railway, the narrow-gauge rail- 

 way, the elevated railway, and all the other tramway devices ex- 

 cept her own, to go scot-free of congresses and of State legisla- 

 tures that sit nine months in every year to make new laws for 

 this law-prolific United States. 



It seems hard indeed to believe that the trolley, with all its 

 easy dodging of expenses, can do much more for shippers than the 

 railway has accomplished. In spite of tributes demanded, the 

 American railway has reduced freights again to where they stood 

 before the Interstate Commerce Commission sent them up, so that 

 our railways now carry for an average of one dollar and twenty- 

 two cents a ton, as against an average of two dollars and two 

 cents for the rest of the world, f 



The above are a few considerations which lie on the surface 

 of the present enormous development of an invention which had 

 hardly been born at all, but it had leaped like Minerva, adult and 

 armored, from the alleged front of Jove. It may almost be said 

 that it came in obedience to a reluctant summons which was only 

 uttered after almost every other conceivable form of rapid transit 

 had been tried, retried, rejected, and tried over again! In the 

 city of New York, for example (to take the most crowded spot on 

 two continents, where business urgencies of every conceivable 

 character are cramped between waterways upon a narrow island), 

 almost all the varieties of tramway transportation played at leap- 

 frog with each other for years before the trolley came ! The his- 

 tory is a curious one, and will bear repeating. But the most 

 curious thing about it is, after all, the long and slow mental pro- 

 cesses by which New York capitalists after sinking hundreds of 

 millions of dollars in building railways across trackless forests 

 and frozen mountains and over unpopulated prairies arrived at 



* This railway, as it happens, was chartered not by any State, but by the United States, 

 and surely the nation has a right to wreck its own railway by its own laws if it sees fit. 



\ The actual figures are to-day in Europe: Germany, $1.22 ; Austria, .$2.10; Belgium, 

 $1.54; Denmark, $2.76 ; France, $2.14; Italy, $2.40; Luxemburg, $1.92; Norway, $3 ; 

 Holland, $1.52 ; Roumania, $2.64 ; Russia, $2.32 ; Finland, $1.98 ; Switzerland, $3.36. 



