284 THE GROUNDSWELL. 



to the rights of the citizens. The roads have a right to take your 

 lands, for you gave it to them ; but they have no right to go beyond 

 the limits of reason and justice in making their charges for carrying 

 freights and passengers. The principles of free government prohibit 

 the right to do injustice to the people. No government can be supe 

 rior to the people themselves, and when the people of Illinois deter 

 mine that they will not submit to exactions, they will begin to cease. 

 When it is understood that men will not submit to them their lib 

 erties are safe, and then only. Laws must be submitted to and 

 obeyed, so long as they are in force. But when laws do not accom 

 plish that for which they were framed they should be changed. 

 You must look at this railway question from a radical stand-point, 

 and must take the position that whatever it is necessary to do you 

 will do. You have declared railways to be highways ; that they are 

 under the control of the legislature, and that their officers are pub 

 lic agents. The managers of these railways are in Wall Street, New 

 York, and your troubles begin there among the jobbers in these 

 stocks. There, and in other large cities, railway stocks are personal 

 property, and pass from hand to hand, and you never know who 

 owns them. They are the subjects upon which men gamble. Now, 

 you should repeal the laws that make them personal property, and 

 have them so managed that you would know of their transfers and 

 who owned the stocks. You can not, as it now is, get at the real 

 managers of these western railways. I would sweep out of exist 

 ence the laws by which these stocks are made personal property. I 

 would fix it so the stock could not be watered. Who knows what 

 the roads in this State cost ? No one except railway men, for the 

 stocks are watered, and watered to death. I would declare these 

 railways to be highways, and allow farmers and others to put cars 

 upon these tracks, and compete with the railway companies in their 

 own business, and when this can be done, much will have been ac 

 complished. We are but in the infancy of this business, and men 

 lire now living who will see railways multiplied indefinitely, and 

 you must study this thing with a view to getting at what is to be. 

 You remember, in Jackson s time, how men shook at the idea of 

 having a corporation control thirty-six millions ! Why, there are 

 men here who can remember how that idea made men shake. What 

 do you see now ? Men who control untold millions to corrupt the 

 people. A man in Pennsylvania who can raise the price of every 



