Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/699

 REVIEWS

Government Regulation of Railway Rates: A Study of the Experience of the United States, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Australia. By HUGO RICHARD MEYER, Assistant Professor of Political Economy in the University of Chicago. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1905. Pp. xxvii+486.

The author is a decided opponent of state railway systems, and of all regulation of railways and railway tariffs by the government: "for it is the verdict of all experience that governments will not, and cannot, make railway rates that will meet the needs of expanding trade and industry" (p. xvii)—a most emphatic and very harsh verdict, which this professor (care should be taken not to confound him with Professor Balthasar H. Meyer, now railway commissioner of Wisconsin) attempts to prove from the experiences which Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, Russia, and Australia have had with government-made freight tariffs, and the United States with company-made tariffs. According to our author, we find, on the one hand, in the countries in which the state influences the tariffs, heavy shadows, dense mediæval darkness; while, on the other hand, the privately made tariffs of the United States reflect nothing but clear light, sparkling sunshine, which would beam still more brightly if the error had not been made in the United States of restricting the freedom of the exemplary railways through the enactment of the Interstate Commerce Act and the institution of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Part I of Professor Meyer's book, composed of eight chapters (pp. 1-203), depicts the pernicious effect of state railway tariffs, while Part II (pp. 203-473), portrays the magnificent, overwhelming economic results of the far-sighted tariff policy of the railways of the United States.

This is undoubtedly an entirely new conception new not only to the German, but also to the American reader. It is seldom that