ARE RAILROADS PUBLIC ENEMIES? 587 



this republic — whose enemies, Mr. Hudson will have us believe, all 

 railways are. Nor is it a figure of speech to say, in this case not only, 

 but in every case of a railroad upon which a mortgage is spread, that 

 so far from the railway being the enemy, it is the creature of the re- 

 public, for the republic is the people, and the people, by owning the 

 securities of a railway, own the railway itself. Mr. Hudson may fire 

 the popular heart of the non-investor by his periods ; but if, per- 

 chance, he desires more than this, he can not yet claim to have found 

 either a place to stand, or a fulcrum for his lever. 



II. Pools are combinations of railways at once with and against 

 each other, never against the public, or (if Mr. Hudson prefers) the 

 republic. The name is unfortunate, as suggesting a pot or lump, 

 whereas, in fact, the pool is an elaborate system of differentiation and 

 equating, by which railroads practically pay into the pool, not their 

 lumped receipts, but percentages thereof. These pools are the legiti- 

 mate and necessary results of the rechartering over and over again 

 of railway companies to transact business between the same points, by 

 paralleling each other. So long as the people in their Legislatures 

 will thus charter parallel lines serving identical points — thus dividing 

 territory they once granted entire — it is not exactly clear how they 

 can complain if the lines built (by money invested if not on the good 

 faith of the people, at least in reliance upon an undivided business) 

 combine to save themselves from bankruptcy. Without such com- 

 bination the strongest company must bankrupt and " gobble " the 

 others, which survival of the fittest would be exactly what Mr. 

 Hudson declaims and deprecates — a Monopoly ; and this time a most 

 grasping and cruel one, since the first aim of the surviving road must 

 logically be to recoup itself for the tremendous expenses of the "gob- 

 ble " by extravagant overcharges ! Had a pooling system existed at 

 the date of its birth, the Standard Oil Company octopus could never 

 have grown up. And it is interesting reading — as Joe Gargery would 

 say — to find our Mr. Hudson snarling on one page at railways because 

 they render such monopolies as the Standard Oil Company possible, 

 and, on the next, cursing pools as against public interest. And not 

 only are pools safeguards against private monopolies, but, as against 

 the " tie-up " and the boycott, bound to become the needed, possibly 

 the only, antidote if not the only relief, possible. Individuals may, 

 and no doubt do, from geographical conditions, suffer from the ab- 

 sence of competition which pools guarantee. Doubtless a shipper at 

 Buffalo could make better terms to New York were five trunk lines 

 engaged in the suicidal pastime of cutting each other's throats. But 

 the greatest good of the greatest number is subserved by an honest 

 rate, and that the pool secures to it. 



III. Construction companies are conservers of time and capital at 

 once to the public and to the railway-builder. If a railway between 

 two given points be needed at all, it is needed as soon as possible. 



