CONGRESS. (LNTER-STATE COMMERCE.) 



213 



prefacing to the sections establishing a commis- 

 sion with full powers a number of sections em- 

 bracing as many of Judge Reagan's provisions 

 as a majority of us regarded practicable. We 

 have omitted none that we think the judgment 

 of the country will demand in this new and ten- 

 tative measure of legislation. We have admit- 

 ted one which, I trust, we shall strike from the 

 bill and thereby amend it." 



Mr. Anderson, of Kansas, argued that com- 

 petition was set aside by combination : 



" We are often told that the great safeguard 

 of the grower of products shipped by rail is 

 the competition between carriers. It is alleged 

 that competition is the safeguard of all trade ; 

 that almost from time immemorial this fact has 

 been one of the laws of trade and recognized 

 as a fundamental principle of political econ- 

 omy. And that statement was formerly cor- 

 rect. But any gentleman who will look at the 

 effect which the building of railroads, which 

 the employment of steam as a motor on water 

 in the transportation of freight, which elec- 

 tricity, which the printing-press have had upon 

 capital, upon labor, upon the great trade move- 

 ments of the world, will find that these are 

 factors which have very largely eliminated com- 

 petition as a real force in commerce. And the 

 question is to-day whether the farmer who 

 raises wheat or who raises cotton, or any one 

 else who is compelled to pay freights for rail 

 transportation, actually possesses the safeguard 

 of competition; whether the competition be- 

 tween the Pennsylvania Central and the Balti- 

 more and Ohio and the New York and Erie and 

 the New York Central, as rival carriers, secures 

 to him the lowest rate at which the service can 

 profitably be done. 



" What are the facts in regard to that ? The 

 canny Scotchman who invented, or at least 

 used, the first locomotive and built the first 

 railroad, enunciated a sound though in his day a 

 ridiculed proposition when he stated that 'where 

 combination is possible competition is impos- 

 sible.' To-day that proposition has supplanted 

 competition as a safeguard. If you will stop a 

 moment to think of the extent to which com- 

 bination has been carried and of the vast area 

 over which competition has been abrogated, 

 you will be startled. Take one half of this 

 continent, that west of the Mississippi River. 

 With the Northern- Pacific, with the Union 

 Pacific, with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa 

 Fe, with the Texas Pacific, one would think 

 that certainly so vast an area would in compe- 

 tition find a safeguard against all extortion by 

 these companies. But what are the facts? 

 Every single one of those roads is pooled with 

 the others for the express purpose of prevent- 

 ing competition ; and to such a degree is the 

 perfection of these pools carried that they do 

 substantially prevent competition. And you 

 find that the people who control these Jines, 

 that Jay Gould, Dillon, Huntington, the Bos- 

 ton parties, and a few more men whom you 

 could count on the fingers of your two hands, 



are in such combinations that they actually do 

 collect from the whole area of half a continent 

 precisely what rates they please, and that the 

 farmers in that area who raise and ship their 

 products, or who buy manufactured articles, 

 are forced to pay the rate which, under their 

 pool and by its abrogation of competition, these 

 men are enabled to extort. 



"But we are told that the water-ways of 

 the country are our safeguard. I used to think 

 they were. It seemed to me that at least upon 

 the waves of the Atlantic and the heaving bil- 

 lows of the Pacific Ocean, where no rail could 

 be spiked and no locomotive run, there assur- 

 edly and eternally would be an open highway 

 in competition with the transcontinental lines. 

 But what are the facts? Why, sir, that the 

 California roads are to-day in pool with the 

 ocean-steamers, and have wiped out competi- 

 tion by compelling the steamship lines to form 

 the pool or be run out of the trade. So that 

 not only does Euntington own all California 

 in that sense, not only do these few men con- 

 trol the whole half of the continent in that 

 sense, but they control the Pacific Ocean in so 

 far as by steamship lines it comes in competi- 

 tion or may come in competition with their 

 roads. And why? Because they have the 

 capital to do it. Where do they get it from ? 

 They get it from the men who raise the crops 

 and ship them over their roads, and use that 

 precise money in building steamship lines to 

 prevent these very men from having the bene- 

 fit of competition that a beneficent Creator de- 

 signed when placing the oceans. 



" Take the case with respect to the Atlantic 

 slope, which largely furnishes our cotton-fields. 

 Before the war the great avenues of cotton 

 shipment were down the Ohio and Mississippi 

 Rivers and abreast the Atlantic coast. How is 

 it to-day? Have you the competition which 

 one would naturally suppose should result from 

 these geographical conditions? Let me read 

 a paragraph or two upon this point. I read 

 from a paper by Joseph Nimmo, Chief of the 

 Bureau of Statistics of the Treasury Depart- 

 ment: 



commerce has been enormously increased. Between 

 the years 1852 and 1875 several great east and west 

 trunk lines were constructed from the Atlantic sea- 

 board to the Mississippi Kiver, connecting subse- 

 quently to the year 1864 ; at Cincinnati, Louisville, 

 Cairo, and St. Louis with great railroad systems 

 extending into all parts of the " cotton belt." It was 

 not, however, until after the late war that the man- 

 agers of the great east and west trunk lines, and of 

 the trunk lines extending southward from the Ohio 

 River and from St. Louis, were led to believe that 

 they could successfully compete with water routes for 

 the transportation of cotton to Northern mills and to 

 Northern seaports, even from the southern part of 

 Tennessee and from Arkansas; but the northward 

 " overland" all-rail movement amounted during the 

 year ended August 81, 1883, to 1,178,560 bales, or 17 

 per. cent, of the entire cotton-crop. Not only is cot- 

 ton thus transported from Tennessee and Arkansas, 

 but also from points far down toward the Gulf, in 



