RAILROADS AND TRADE-CENTERS, 339 



trade-centers as we have watering-places, for example, until this na- 

 tion, where the people make the laws and own themselves, becomes 

 the land of trade-centers ! And if the coarse and brutal railway com- 

 pany — owned by the grasping and bloated capitalist, the heartless 

 Gould, or Vanderbilt, or Huntington, or Garrett — will not give us any 

 trade-centers, let us petition the Interstate Commerce Commission, 

 that these men and their soulless companies cease to dominate and 

 despotize over this republic, and build us trade-centers wherever we 

 want them ; and, if they then refuse, let the Commission itself desig- 

 nate the points where our trade-centers shall hereafter erect themselves, 

 and to which our railways shall build their track. 



The simple, honest truth is that railways, like natural persons, 

 must live by doing what is set before them ; that however their tariffs 

 are regulated, whether discriminations by rebates and drawbacks are 

 allowed or disalloAved, whether they are ordered to charge more for 

 the long haul or the short, whether passes are given to shippers or re- 

 fused — the railway must do the business the people bring to it, or go 

 into bankruptcy and wind up. If grain seeks Chicago, if beef seeks 

 New York, if cotton seeks New Orleans — to Chicago, New York, and 

 New Orleans must the railway haul these products. It can not carry 

 them to Milwaukee, to Albany, to Mobile. And, moreover, to pay its 

 fixed charges, the railway company, like any natural person, must take 

 the business it pays it to do, and reject that which will not pay it. 

 Neither a railway company, nor all the railways on this continent, nor 

 yet the Interstate Commerce Commission, nor any merely human 

 agency, can make a trade-center. It is a disappointment, no doubt, 

 that this is so ; that toward points already favored with ample water 

 communication, and to those only, will railroads extend their tracks, 

 and ultimate their systems. But, even though that disappointment be 

 crystallized in penal and prohibitory legislation, such indeed has al- 

 ways been the vital principle of self-preservation in the railway, as in 

 the human system : and such, indeed, I fear (especially since Judge 

 Deady has held judicially that railways have a right to live), will al- 

 ways be the rule, whether or no this people's antidote for their disap- 

 pointment be to place the railroads in charge of changing Administra- 

 tions at Washington, or whether tariffs will be more reasonable when 

 left to politicians than to railway experts. 



An English writer maintains that international arbitration must take the 

 place of war, because war costs so much more than it used to do. The expense 

 of war in the middle ages was limited to the men it killed, the property it actu- 

 ally destroyed, and the value of the industrial occupations the soldiers were with- 

 drawn from. Now the burden of even a local war of relative insignificance is 

 felt in every quarter of the world ; and important business enterprises at the 

 antipodes may be ruined by conflicts which in the old days would hardly have 

 been heard of outside of their immediate scenes. 



