THE POLITICAL CONTROL OF RAILWAYS. 455 



THE POLITICAL CONTROL OF RAILWAYS: IS IT 

 CONFISCATION ? 



By APPLETON MOEGAN. 



IT may be doubted whether the non-enforcement of the Interstate 

 Commerce law, however fortunate for the railway companies, 

 is not an unmixed calamity for the country. For, if the shortest 

 way to abolish a bad law is to vigorously enforce it, the danger is 

 that the slumber of so un-American and unconstitutional a meas- 

 ure will lead, by mere lapse of time, to its becoming an apparent 

 part of our governmental policy, and so, at the last, all the more 

 awkward to be got rid of. Had the principle of the interstate 

 commerce law been applied by Congress to any other industry or 

 industries than that of transportation, it is exceedingly doubtful if 

 the industries so paternally favored would have acquiesced as 

 patiently and good-naturedly as have the railway companies. 

 But there is no knowing how far the precedent may be pushed. 

 So long as consumers outnumber producers and purchasers out- 

 number sellers, if the temptation should ever arise for the con- 

 sumers and purchasers to decree the price at which producers 

 shall produce and sellers sell (that is to say, for the majority to 

 confiscate the property of the minority), certainly the principle of 

 the interstate commerce law could be cited in favor of such a con- 

 fiscation. (The railway companies in at least one of our Western 

 States have been enjoying this sort of confiscation, under what 

 has been called "the Iowa idea," viz., that "railways can take 

 care of themselves," in abject silence now for many years, thus 

 affording another cumulative precedent for a possible majority 

 programme.) 



When Judge Nelson set aside the verdict of a jury, on the 

 ground that it " took thirteen men to rob a corporation in that 

 court," he was entertaining a sort of judicial cognizance of that 

 disposition on the part of the average " jury of the vicinage " 

 toward railway companies which, unchecked, would quite speedily 

 make railway operating a very costly amusement for investors. 

 But the utmost juries can do toward robbing or crippling rail- 

 way corporations is a very small matter compared with this latest 

 movement of political forces, to confiscate — under the pretext of 

 caring for — the interests of the people, of which the laws we are 

 about to glance at are the outcome. Every sovereign State in this 

 Union has constituted a "Board of Railway Commissioners," 

 which is, and must be, political in its character, and so shifting 

 with the politics of the State and of its Executive ; and to these 

 boards is relegated the whole procedure of the railway companies. 



