Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/95

Rh rates on the transcontinental carriage to the East. There is no question as to the need of them here. In no other section are present transportation facilities so inadequate to existing demands. Car famines recur regularly and in most aggravated forms. No other section is taxed so heavily for what service it gets. Nowhere else is potential development being retarded to the same degree.

The problem of progress for this section narrows down to about this: Is it feasible to utilize fully through improvement the Columbia and its tributary waterways to relieve this congestion of traffic and so cheapen transportation costs as to stimulate vastly the development of this section? Before turning to an examination of the availability of the Columbian waterways, just one observation on the results of further delay in undertaking a scientific adjustment of these transportation facilities seems advisable. The present condition of perplexingly inadequate facilities, and monopoly charges prohibitive of further levelopment, naturally raises an unreasoning clamor for duplications in hopes of lower rates through competition. This betrays a state of intelligence that is unmindful of the fact that the cost and maintenance of great railway structures, that serve only to divide traffic with a road already existing, mean fastening upon its supporters a load almost the double of what would have been necessary had the service of the existing line been co-ordinated with that of an available waterway. Fortunately, however, the measure of undeveloped resources here protects this region, too, from such permanent incubuses much as eastern sections through their development escaped evils of excessive duplications. Surely a clearer conception on the part of the people at large of what is involved in a scientifically adjusted transportation system would have forestalled the possibility of such a transaction as Mr. Harriman's in diverting thirteen millions from the surplus accumulated through extortionate charges upon the producers in the Oregon Railway and Navigation territory, towards the securing of terminals in Tacoma and