RAILROADS AND TRADE-CENTERS. 333 



which interest is to be earned), but the minutest daily detail of such 

 operation, is a rather costly method of gratifying a single Senator's 

 or even a whole Congress's laudable curiosity as to " what are the 

 natural channels of traffic, or what would be the effect of the natural 

 laws of trade upon many, at least, of the present commercial centers " ; 

 and that it appears to be a rather cool proposition to charge the cost 

 of gratifying the aforesaid curiosity upon the only party who had be- 

 trayed no curiosity in the premises whatever, but kept on its even 

 tenor, operating at its own cost the franchises the people had given 

 it, and endeavoring to pay one and one third per cent on the capital it 

 employed. 



But, to drop the student of political history, it is important, it 

 seems to me, for the present generation to know, at last, just why the 

 Interstate Commerce law was passed, and for just what sins of the 

 railways they have been put under pedagogical surveillance. It is be- 

 cause these wicked railicays have been creating trade-centers! The 

 revelation is a particularly startling one, because among the railways 

 themselves the maxim had always been to try and accommodate them- 

 selves to such trade-centers of the country as already existed at any 

 possible expense and at all hazard. No terror of injunctions out of 

 chancery were too tei'rible ; no right of way was too costly ; no rivers 

 too broad ; no mountains too solid ; but the railway must supermount 

 and penetrate, at whatever expense, to reach the trade-center which 

 Nature had already provided. This, I say, has always been the maxim 

 of the railway company : "Do the business of your territory, count 

 first cost of construction as absolutely nothing. A railway is a means 

 of supply to a trade-center, or a connection between two or more trade- 

 centers. The product of the country must have its best markets, but 

 those best markets are at its trade-centers ; at all odds we must get 

 to them. No matter where the president of the company lives, or 

 where the capital is subscribed. Construct our line to the best mar- 

 ket ! " Such, practically, have been the directors' and the promoters' 

 instructions. And, indeed, it has always seemed to be supposed, even 

 outside of the magic circle of the railway companies, that the capital 

 to build railroads was subscribed on the understanding that they were 

 to do the public business, and not operate against it and in its teeth, 

 and that it would be unnecessary demonstration of corporate idiocy 

 to attempt to procure capital upon any other. But now comes Senator 

 Cullom with his proposition, and we are advised that we have all been 

 wrong ; that, instead, these naughty railways have been at work not 

 connecting but creati^tg trade-centers ! 



Had anybody but one of the fathers of the Interstate Commerce 

 Commission made this statement, not much attention might have been 

 paid to it. Every railroad man — certainly every shipper over a rail- 

 way — knows that the establishment of a trade-center is a matter en- 

 tirely out of the power and beyond the control of railway companies 



