THE POLITICAL CONTROL OF RAILWAYS. 461 



the lowest rates. The dwellers along that line have the advan- 

 tage of these low rates to which, of the other two railways, only 

 one can approximate ; while the third line must either go to the 

 other extreme, or defraud the holders of its securities. Not to 

 dilate unnecessarily upon the situation, the reader can see at once 

 that prohibiting a long and short haul discrimination upon any 

 one railway really increases discrimination to the whole people ; 

 and that, on the whole, the pooling system was the fairest system 

 for the whole people, as well as for the railways, that could have 

 been devised, for both shipper and investor : for the shipper, since 

 it gave him all the benefits of cheap freights ; and for the investor 

 in railways, because it secured to the railway built under heavy 

 capitalization, and laboring beneath huge operating expenses (but 

 serving a territory as entitled as any other, per se, to transporta- 

 tion facilities), a fair return upon the wealth that had been lav- 

 ished to build it. 



The theory of the interstate commerce law was borrowed from 

 Europe — from England and Germany ; and, although there may 

 be those who admit that whatever is good enough for England or 

 Germany is good enough for the United States, it ought not to be 

 forgotten that neither of these eminent nations possess railroad 

 systems at all analogous to our own, or in the operation of which 

 anything like the same problems or conditions arise. The exist- 

 ence of two, let alone five or six, parallel lines is not only un- 

 known, but impossible, in either of those countries ; and yet the 

 promoters of the interstate commerce act in Congress, and apolo- 

 gists for it ever since, pointed and still point with pride to the fact 

 that the provisions of the act can not be onerous, because their 

 operation has been tested, without annihilating the railway inter- 

 est, in England and in Germany ! * As a matter of fact, there are 

 several hundred other practical discrepancies between American 

 and foreign railways; but it would swell this paper unduly to 

 discuss them here, and the above-mentioned alone is enough to 

 dispense with the plea that the interstate commerce act is a good 

 one for this people because its tenor has worked well across the 

 ocean. I might add, however, that, despotic as is the German 

 Government — the government of blood and iron — over all private 

 enterprise, at any rate it has never yet discriminated against the 

 enterprise of its own subjects in favor of the schemes of national 

 rivals. Doubtless it is unfair to charge to the framers of the inter- 

 state commerce act a desire to benefit Canadian railroads (notably 

 the Canadian Pacific Railroad) at the expense of our own rail- 

 ways. That such has been the paramount unpatriotic effect of 



* " Much of the language used in the most important sections " (in the act) " has a set- 

 tled meaning, having been judicially construed either in this country or in England." — 

 Senator Cullom's Springfield speech. 



