Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/352

338 States and nation, the class alone from which the judiciary is chosen—"retained," made comfortable in their income year in and year out, without respect to the duties they perform or the offices they hold, barring judicial positions, by the powerful transportation companies.

We find citizens, officers, law-makers and judges overawed and corrupted by a power that yields no adequate subjection to the powers of the State.

We find a public sentiment alarmed at this situation, but almost despairing how to act helpfully.

We find threats to deal with the matter summarily, and with precedents that it is the unexpected that happens, with knowledge of the destroying power in human society of the ebullition of collected human passion, it is not the part of wisdom not to inquire into and to be indifferent to these threats; and such an inquiry is specially obligatory in a popular government like that of the United States.

The status of transportation—whether it is an affair of commerce or the body politic, or part of one and part of the other, and the ill defined thought and the unpronounced action upon it marks the first point of the difficulty.

Second, we have had a strong leaning to it as purely a matter of commerce.

Third, in the presence of a sentiment that has at length reached public conviction that it is partly at least an affair of the body politic, has arisen an embarrassment of how to treat it as such.

The embarrassment is greatly augmented in the fact that we are under a dual government of local and general authority, between which the lines are not clearly drawn, and which has been a burning question of politics, and many believe may be again fanned into a flame.

The civil war was latterly an affair of sections of the country, but the sentiment that led to it rested largely upon the question of local or general, State or national Government, and many have hoped that no serious point would ever arise again in this controversy. While the railroad problem is not a matter wherein jealousy has been engendered between the States and the General Government, it has been viewed in the light of a matter between local and centralized authority and so subject in some degree to the feeling or prejudice accentuated by the war, that was anterior to it and that largely had its growth as a national issue in the desire of the South to protect the institution of slavery. The result of that war was on the side of the General Government as an issue of local and General Government, as well as in the main issue, but on all sides the distaste is pronounced for more issues partaking of this character.

From the view that transportation, on the colossal scale on which we have railroad transportation in this country, is in some measure a matter of government, it is plain now, and seems as though it might