Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/357

Rh In this service of transportation the individuals who are served cohere, they become the public; the transportation company, acting in its proper sphere, is the "servant" of the public as the President and all executive officers are servants of the public and of the people. If transportation companies favor one it does not end there, it injures somebody else; the favor received is an injury to the business competitor of the favored one. This is positive evidence, as the condemnations of public and private property for their use is negative evidence, that they exercise public functions.

If it was not profitable for individuals to establish the most approved means of transportation, it would be the duty of the State to establish them. On this theory the United States Government grants lands and its credit for the construction of the Pacific Railroads, individual States have built canals, and cities construct water-works and sewers.

All this, in connection with the character of the power of railroad and other transportation managers, means that they riot in the exercise of public power, and in the execution of public functions, the same as kings rioted in their power before it was satisfactorily demonstrated that their only or most legitimate use was to exercise for the interest of the public a delegated power.

The United States, standing on the ground of laissez faire more than any other civilized nation, has been the slowest in asserting itself in regard to the public functions of railroad companies, and, while we can not weigh accurately the value to us as a nation of over-construction and over-competition in railroads, presuming that there has been a value in them, we have had violence done to the spirit of our institutions; we have had the conditions of life, actual or relative, made harder to the average man; we have had suspicions cast upon the dictum of Lincoln, that this is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people; and we have seen the transportation corporations usurp or control the wealth, the honors, the Government (of their own specific and of a general kind) of the United States in a way that is abhorrent to the general sense of justice of civilized, or at least English-speaking, people. We have arrived at that position where we can not claim much advantage except our virgin soil, and what comes from our extent and isolation, over the governments of Europe that emerged into civilization from the dark ages, whose people have been afflicted with the theory of the divine right of kings, and who are, in one country or another, now loaded with primogeniture, entail, aristocratic orders in society, church government imposed upon state government, and a system so prejudicial to personal advantage that years of youth are condemned to participation in, or preparation for, war. The special kind of humanity that, it has been claimed, grew and would continue to grow on American soil, seems to have many departures from the boasted type, and we assimilate more and more to the older govern