Page:Other People's Money - Louis Brandeis.djvu/208

 Association of Railway Commissionars. They should be enacted into law. And they should be supplemented by amendments of the Commodity Clause of the Hepbrn Act, so that: 1. Railroads will be effectually prohibited from owning stock in corporations whose products they transport; 2. Such corporations will be prohibited from owning important stockholdings in railroads; and 3. Holding companies will be prohibited from controlling, as does the Reading, both a railroad and corporations whose commodities it transports. If laws such as these are enacted and duly enforced, we shall be protected from a recurrence of tragedies like the New Haven, of domestic scandals like the Chicago and Alton, and of international ones like the Frisco. We shall also escape from that inefficiency which is attendant upon excessive size. But what is far more important, we shall, by such legislation, remove a potent factor in financial concentration. Decentralization will begin. The liberated smaller units will find no difficulty in financing their needs without bowing the knee to money lords. And a long step will have been taken toward attainment of the New Freedom.