148 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 
cannot be required to contract for through business with all roads and 
should not be asked to. The proposed bill sought to break up an 
established through line. 
6. The claim that freight consigned to shippers over the Denver and 
New Orleans was diverted from that road and shipped over the Rio 
Grande was not substantiated. A law against this sort of thing already 
existed. No freight need be paid in such cases. 
7. The bill was experimental legislation and therefore not to be recom- 
mended. Nothing of this sort in legislation was in existence. 3 
8. The title of the bill was a misnomer according to the opinion of 
the committee. The bill, so it was charged, was not intended to enforce 
the constitutional provisions, but aimed to punish shippers rather than 
carriers as it sought to prevent the Santa Fe from making the best bargain 
it could in getting its goods from Pueblo to Denver. From Pueblo to 
Denver the Santa Fe was a shipper and not a carrier. In closing their 
discussion the committee say, ‘“‘The constitutional doctrine prohibiting 
railroads from discriminating between shippers is turned end for end, 
and is made to apply so as to prevent shippers from discriminating 
between railroads.” 
The committee reported that they could not see how the bill would 
enforce either of the sections of the state constitution which it was 
designed to enforce and on March 20, 1885, filed their report recom- 
mending that the bill be indefinitely postponed. There was also a 
minority report recommending that the bill pass after certain amend- 
ments had been made in accordance with the suggestions of members 
of the committee. One of these was that the law apply to traffic wholly 
within the state. This looks as though some member of the committee 
had a notion of the control of inter-state commerce given to Congress by 
the federal Constitution, but at that time Congress had not asserted this 
control in the matter of railroad regulation. The majority report of 
the committee was adopted and the bill indefinitely postponed.?_ During 
the same month the Denver and New Orleans Railroad having reached 
the bottom of the financial abyss was sold under foreclosure. It was 
later reorganized and in the course of time became a part of the Union 
Pacific system. It is now the Colorado and Southern. 
1 Senate Journal, 1885, p. 1056. 2 [bid., 1885, p. 1071. 
