Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/579

543 VALUE OF THE SERVICE AS A FACTOR IN RATE MAKING 543 there is no knowing whether the intended meaning is one or more of these enumerated considerations of policy, or other comparable ones, or all of them together; but something that may be classi- fied as an idea of policy is probably always in mind. Perhaps the phrase has been oftenest used, though never defined, in the widest sense it can have {i. e., the widest which excludes cost, and so is intelligible as a proposed criterion coordinate with cost) — the resultant of all the considerations other than cost (and discrimina- tion) which ought as a matter of public policy to influence rates. Value of the service, in any of these senses, not only is not, but should not be, and in some directions could not be, allowed to over- rule cost. The most obvious objection to a value criterion is its indefiniteness. This results not merely from the fact that its formal definition is a matter of uncertainty and dispute. The several proposed definitions are each incapable of being apphed to particular facts with any approach to certainty. What is the measure of what "commodities and the industries that use them can well stand" ? How many rates elsewhere are to be collected for comparison, and is their simple average, a weighted average, or some other function to be selected? Is the rate per ton on every commodity to constitute the same fraction of its value, and if not, on what are variations from normal to be based? Just how much do all the considerations of pubhc policy (independent of cost) make it desirable that the rate on coal from Scranton to New York should be? Value of the service cannot be made a primary criterion of rates without asking some questions of this sort; and if such questions are to be answered at all, they cannot fail to be answered in a great and shifting variety of ways. As Commis- sioner Meyer, speaking for the Interstate Commerce Commission, has said: "As between . . . the cost of the service and the value of the serv- ice, the first is decidedly more capable of exact determination and mathematical expression than the latter. If, as some would have us believe, no measure has yet been discovered for ascertaining the cost of the service, what measure is there suggesting anything definite and tangible and suflSciently practical in its application to carry conviction which can be applied to the value of the service? " ^' 8» BoUeau p. P & L. E. R. R., 22 I. C. C. 640, 652 (1912). Cf. Duluth St. Ry. Co. 9. R. R. Com. of Wis., 161 Wis. 245, 152 N. W. 887 (1915).