A GLANCE AT THE HISTORY OF RAILROADS IN MISSOURI. 171 
finance by the Federal Government, Moreover, neither taxes nor transportation 
charges were reduced, nor was it clearly apparent that either of them could be 
reduced without clogging the wheels of local government or of commerce. In 
this dire emergency, our people exhibited a degree of wisdom and of nerve rarely 
witnessed in any community. We ordered the assembling of a constitutional 
convention, we passed a legislative enactment limiting railroad rates on our chief 
articles of export, such as grain and live stock, on some imports of prime import- 
ance, such as salt, lumber and agricultural implements, and on passengers; and 
we created a Board of Railroad Commissioners to exercise a general supei vision 
over the subject of railroad transportation. These three measures, viewed in the 
transcendently brilliant light of their successful results, exhibit an extraordinary 
capacity for self-government unsurpassed by any people, and furnish material for 
one of the brighest pages of history that ever adorned the annals of any common- 
wealth. The Constitutional Convention boldly struck at the root of the evil of 
public debts by prohibiting their creation in the future, and of excessive taxation 
by limiting the rate thereof. On this subject I will quote a few paragraphs from 
an article written at the request of a gentleman in another State, and published 
there, four years after the adoption of the constitution framed by that Conven- 
tion. 
"This constitution was framed under circumstances, although not peculiar 
to Missouri, yet so grave and ominous as to challenge the attention of reflecting 
minds throughout the commonwealth. The State, the counties, the cities, and 
towns, had gone recklessly into debt, mainly for the purpose of securing the 
building of railroads, and more of these had been constructed than the commerce 
of the State could supply with a paying business. There was a mile of railroad to 
every 625 inhabitants in the whole State, and in the forty-four counties north and 
east of the Missouri River, there was a mile of railroad to every 400 people and 
to every fourteen square miles of territory. According to one of the best author- 
ities it takes 825 inhabitants to the mile to make a railroad earn a living in the 
United States. In some cases where local subsidies had been granted in amount 
equal to the total cost of construction, the roads so subsidized were found to be 
mortgaged for $30,000 a mile. The waste of public treasure had been frightful, 
and the amount of public debt was appalling. The Federal debt was $50 per 
capita, the State debt $10 more, the county debts as high as $40 more, amount- 
ing, in some counties, to $roo a head on the rural population, while the urban 
populations carried additional burdens varying from $5 to $60 a head. The 
lowest possible public debt on any community in the State was therefore $60 per 
capita, and the average was somewhere between that and $150, while the assessed 
value of all property based on the high prices of preceding years averaged only 
$300 per capita. At the same time the selling price of property had depreciated to 
seventy-five and fifty, and in the case of some products of labor, as low as twenty- 
five per cent of what it was when these debts were created, whereby the burden 
of the latter was double or even trebled, and made equal in extreme cases to the 
average value of property per capita. No free people will long carry such a 
