Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/353

Rh have been plain at any time, that it is too wide in its scope to be treated successfully by the local State governments. There are two divisions to the subject from the national standpoint:

The position of the Government toward it as defined by the Constitution.

The general ground on which governmental action stands, making it necessary. Of what that action should be, this paper does not aim to treat.

1. The language of the Constitution pertaining to the subject is, "Congress shall have power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes."

Applying this to railroads, the interpretation commonly made is that where a railroad company's chief means of transportation, that is its tracks, extend from one State into another, such railroad company comes constitutionally under the regulation of Congress. The framers of the Constitution certainly had no intention pertaining to transportation in its present form that helps us to interpret this clause of the instrument which they drew; their intention only pertained to the wider generalization—commerce, and must have been suggested by arrangements ordinarily entered into by adjoining States that had no Federal bond. Such arrangements were chiefly treaties. Hence the Constitution debars commercial treaties between States.

"Commerce among the States" is immensely wider in its scope than the mere transference of commodities or passengers over the line of adjoining States. Any railroad or other transportation company that enters into an arrangement with another transportation company for the movement of commodities or passengers from one part of the country to another (and this can not be done except by traversing different States) is a participant in commerce among the States, and so amenable to the clause of the Constitution covering such an act. To claim that a transportation company must actually perform the act of transference from one State into another is standing on the narrowest technical ground, and stands in a very subordinate and unimportant relation to the vital functions of commerce, and would be a poor thing to rest an important relation upon. The company that receipts for property, or sells tickets to passengers, to go out of the State in which these acts are performed, or which delivers property and accepts pay for the transportation of such, which came from other transportation companies and from other States, and which honors tickets for passengers sold by other companies in other States, certainly participates in commerce among the States whether its own property and track is wholly located in one State or not.

2. The special surprise that has taken place in regard to railroad transportation, outside of its mechanical effects (and this is true of other forms of transportation), is the tendency to centralization of management of interests that at the outset appeared to have no special