Page:Other People's Money - Louis Brandeis.djvu/16

 for higher standards in office, the connection of this conspiracy with the country's larger needs. Seldom is an audience at a hearing so moved as it was by Mr. Brandeis's final plea to the committee. Possibly his work on railroads will turn out to be the most significant among the many things Mr. Brandeis has done. His arguments in 1910-11 before the Interstate Commerce Commission against the raising of rates, on the ground that the way for railroads to be more prosperous was to be more efficient, made efficiency a national idea, fit is a cardinal point in his philosophy that the only real progress toward a higher national life will come through efficiency in all our activities. The seventy-eight questions addressed to the railroads by the Interstate Commerce Commission in December, 1913, embody what is probably the most comprehensive embodiment of his thought on the subject. On nothing has he ever worked harder than on his diagnosis of the Money Trust, and when his life comes to be written (I hope many years hence) this will be ranked with his railroad work for its effect in accelerating industrial changes. It is indeed more than a coincidence that so many of the things he has been contending for have