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178 great development beyond what any one can now foresee; new inventions are reasonably sure to cause transformations in railroad business and methods. We have only just reached the point where a few men are competent to manage great lines of railroad on their technical side; we have only just begun to educate men for the railroad business as a profession. Railroad men do not seem yet to have any code of right behavior or right management between themselves — people often deride the professional code of lawyers or doctors, but the value of such a code is seen if we take a case like the one before us, where a new profession has not yet developed a code. The social and economic questions raised by railroads and about railroads are extremely difficult and complicated; we have not, so far, accomplished much of anything toward solving them by experience or theory. The discussion, so far as it has yet gone, has shown only that we have the task yet before us and that, so far, all has been a struggle of various interests to use railroads for their own advantage. The true solution of the only proper legislative problem, viz., how to adjust all the interests so that no one of them can encroach upon the others, has scarcely been furthered at all. It is only necessary to take up a volume of the evidence taken by one of the Congressional committees on this subject, or any debate about it which has arisen in Congress, to see how true it is that conflicting interests are struggling for advantage over each other.

The railroad question is far wider than the scope of any proposed legislation with regard to it; it is so wide that in any period of five or ten years new phases of it come to the front and occupy public attention. Just now the prominent phase is the effect of competition on a weak market; for the time being, the means of trans-