PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. I23 



mileage of Canada, it is manifest that the maintenance of its credit is of vital im- 

 portance to the Canadian people. The improving credit of the Grand Trunk and 

 the established credit of the Canadian Pacific are facts of great consequence to 

 Canada among the nations who supply capital for the development and men for 

 the settlement of new lands; and while we do right to be jealous for the authority 

 of this free community over its carrying corporations, we should be slow to work 

 ourselves into the passionate temper of western Populism, and thereby check the 

 movement of capital from the uneasy centres of the United States into the undevel- 

 oped Canadian Provinces. Capital is mobile. It will not rest where it is constantly 

 menaced by political agitation. It will not seek investment where political con- 

 ditions are unstable, and established enterprises harassed by revolutionary political 

 experiments. The best service we can do for Canada is to introduce into our 

 public controversies and to incorporate into our code of laws the prudence, the sanity, 

 the steadiness of the British political temper and the sober courage and inflexible 

 justice of British legislation. 



III. 



One lesson that a democracy finds hard to learn is that legislation cannot be 

 made omnipotent. In Great Britain, more than in any other country, the practical 

 limitations of Parliamentary authority are understood and appreciated. There, 

 after fruitful centuries of trial and experiment in all the fields of coercive legislation, 

 from statutes fixing the wages of laborers and the prices of goods at wholesale and 

 retail, to statutes declaring the value of money and restraining the freedom of trade, 

 private employments are at length safe from the British legislator^ while over public 

 employments the authority of Parliament is absolute and unquestioned. Railways 

 operate in the field of public employments, exercise rights of expropriation and hold 

 public franchises, and therefore the inferiority of the carrying corporations to the 

 sovereign authority of Parliament is established and the right of regulation and 

 control freely asserted. In truth, the authority of the people over transportation 

 agencies is well settled in all free countries, and argument upon that point may 

 :cKt. Having settled that these powers are vested in Parliament, the question is, 

 through what machinery they can best be exercised. The Railway Committee of 

 the Privy Council at Ottawa has large powers, but these have been but feebly em- 

 ployed for the protection of the public interest, and the technical defences of skilled 

 counsel and the active zeal of equally skilled lobbyists make its procedure tedious 

 and complicate its judgments with political considerations. Then the dealer, who 

 may be prejudiced by discriminatory favors to a competitor; the farmer, whose 

 safety may be imperilled by a dangerous crossing; the town or village, whose pro- 

 gress may be checked by the concession of lower freight charges to a rival com- 

 munity; the carrier that may be refused reasonable interchange of traffic by a com- 

 petitor — each and all of these have found the Railway Committee inadequate to 

 give satisfactory redress. The individual citizen, aggrieved by railway greed or 

 vindictive discrimination, cannot go to the capital and lay his grievance before the 

 committee. The cost is too great, the undertaking too onerous. He requires the 

 privilege of communicating his complaint to a public commissioner, and upon the 

 commissioner should rest the responsibility of investigating the complamt and 

 redressing the injustice. The commission must operate through methods of con- 

 ciliation as well as through methods of compulsion. There is no doubt that in 

 many cases the American advisory commissions, that is, the commissions with 

 power only to report the facts and leave to public opinion, either acting directly 

 on the railway corporations or through the Legislature, the remedy for the evils 

 established, have been influential in redressing the more flagrant discriminations 

 and injustices of railwa}^ managers, and in Massachusetts, for example, it has not 

 been thought necessary to adopt more drastic legislation. But at most the power 



