CHAPTER XXXV. 



RAILWAY LEGISLATION AT HOME AND ABROAD? 



CONTRIBUTED BY J. W. MIDGLEY, ESQ., CHICAGO, PRESIDENT S 

 SECRETARY NORTH-WESTERN RAILWAY. 



The science of transportation has become a popular study. 

 Agitation has made it so. Always interesting to a few, it 

 has recently excited many, whose zeal has, perchance, out 

 run their knowledge. Impatiently, they have told all they 

 know, and more, about the railway system. That system 

 is not faultless; neither has its giant growth been wholly 

 natural. But when men not yet grown old recall the 

 America of their youth before the locomotive created a 

 way over the trackless West they can hardly regard its 

 inroads in the light of unmitigated evils. 



Every country has its bane. Europe is dwarfed by landed 

 aristocracy, military despotism, and superstition, forms 

 of oppression here unknown. But are we quite exempt? 

 Have we not a legislature in every State that can offset 

 the advantage? And are not its specifics the inevitable 

 panacea prescribed for every ill, real or fancied ? Like the 

 credulous patient who resorts to the one patent medicine 



* The three chapters next following present the &quot; Kailroad Side &quot; of 

 course, and with signal ability, as the careful reader will perceive, 

 (406) 



