462 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



that act is merely a proof that its framers overlooked the conse- 

 quences of their hastily advised and badly considered procedure ; 

 were betrayed into regarding the popular hostility to railways 

 from a political rather than from a patriotic standpoint, and so 

 into the folly of precipitating a hard and fast rule upon an indus- 

 try as delicate in its adjustments as it is massive in its ramifica- 

 tions ; an industry of whose operations no single act or necessity 

 of our sixty millions of people is independent ; a rule so hard and 

 so fast that were it attempted to be enforced (as a possible anarch- 

 ist or socialist administration might see fit to enforce it) it would 

 plunge the entire commerce and credit of this continent into 

 chaos in twenty-four hours ! To express the consequences, were 

 it once literally carried into effect, the performances of the typ- 

 ical bull in a china-shop would be a notoriously inadequate fig- 

 ure (removal of a cataract from a human eye with a butcher's 

 cleaver, or oiling the works of a Jurgensen watch by boiling it in 

 axle-grease, might possibly better express the summary vicious- 

 ness of the process). 



So much for the Federal railway statute. As to the railway 

 statistics of the several States, they have been comparatively 

 innocuous — not so much from desuetude as from the general inca- 

 pacity of their administrators. On the whole, their operation has 

 been more largely comedy than tragedy — as where the Board of 

 Railway Commissioners of one State have enacted that upper 

 berths in railway-sleepers shall not be made up before the lower 

 ones ; * that of another have found that if a rail way -bridge had 

 fallen before a train reached it, instead of after the train had passed 

 upon it, it would have been safer for the train ; \ or that if a bridge 

 had been known to be unsafe, a train would not have been run 

 upon it at all. J But that even State railway laws may be danger- 

 ous, I may note two very recent examples. The Board of Railway 

 Commissioners of Mississippi have recently been given increased 

 powers ; have now authority to specify the description and size of 

 station-houses which railway companies must build, and the point 

 and location at which they must stand ; to require the building 

 of union passenger depots where two or more railroads connect, 

 and to allot expenses of the same between the two or more com- 

 panies compelled to pay for erecting them. This, in all con- 

 science, seems to be going far enough. But the Iowa Board of 

 Railroad Commissioners went still further, and not only regulated 

 the question of accommodations, but actually furnished the rail- 

 way companies wiih a schedule of the prices at which they must 

 do the business which the people bring to them : that is to say — for 

 the terms are convertible — ^the prices which the people shall be 



* Minnesota Board of Commissioners. f Illinois Board of Commissioners. 



:}: Massachusetts Board of Commissioners. 



