Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/704

688 of this bill an attempt was made to overcome the objections of the opponents to the canal, and to incorporate provisions whereby the co-operation of rail and waterways was to be assured in the future for the general welfare. All these difficult questions have been thoroughly and exhaustively discussed within the last few years, in parliament as well as in the daily and technical press. Nor are they unknown to the American public. I need only to recall the fight for the improvement of the Erie Canal, the competition of the railways with the Great Lakes, and the plans for an artificial waterway from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi. In Germany and in Prussia this question has long been viewed from a higher plane, even during the time in which private railways still existed. The opinion has always obtained that the natural water-ways had a right to exist alongside the railways. The interests of traffic in general have been rated higher than the exclusive financial interests of the railways. Whether or not the waterways have occasionally been favored too much is a question which I do not desire to discuss on this occasion. At all events, the railway traffic has developed substantially alongside the waterways; and, to put it mildly, it is gross exaggeration on the part of Professor Meyer when he maintains that the Prussian railways have been degraded into mere feeders for the waterways. But this question also is certainly not connected with the assumed inferiority of the state in making rates as compared with private enterprise! The illustration of the commodity rates on sugar which Professor Meyer presents proves exactly the opposite. Furthermore, the fierce wars of the American trunk lines for the grain trade on the Erie Canal are by no means a glorious page in the history of American rail-way tariffs.

The third chapter of Meyer's book deals with the financial policy of the Prussian railways, which are accused, by means of arguments well known here and amply refuted, of being operated too much in the interests of the state treasury. In this attempt—which is again highly characteristic of his entire method of proof—he joins the economic crisis of 1873 with the alleged mistaken financial policy of the year 1891 and following. He claims that, instead of obtaining great surplus earnings from the railways, it should have been the object of the administration to reduce rates, to extend the system, to increase the number of cars, and especially to purchase larger cars. Here we meet all the well-known asser-