Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/601

Rh, in all the immense delicacy of mechanism which moves 8,778,581,061 of people one mile, and billions of dollars' worth of treasure in every direction across and along a continent in a single year, and supports a property representing 87,676,399,054 of securities, a single point for his admiration or even for his approval.

Archimedes had the world for a load and natural science for a lever; but even Archimedes was obliged to sigh for a place whereon to plant bis fulcrum. It appears to me that, in this laborious work of five hundred closely printed octavo pages, what Mr, Hudson lacks most of all is a standpoint. He has a load, he has a grievance for a lever, but, since he can not himself float in space, he makes no impression on what he claims to be the burden to be moved. Mr. Hudson's want of standpoint is prominent at his very outset in his very title-page. He calls his book "The Railways and the Republic," thus antagonizing his two terms. But the grouping is vicious, to begin with; since railroads, whether regarded as legal entities or as companies of individuals, are as much part and parcel of the republic as is Mr. Hudson himself. Starting upon this false major premise, Mr. Hudson proceeds in the first of his eleven chapters to give us the indictment, the remaining ten to be the counts of the particulars.

The title given to this indictment, "The Problem of Railway Domination," is again illicit. Where is the "domination" to be eliminated? Frankly admitting that the present writer believes that railways belong to the persons whose money has built or purchased them, and that their quasi-public character is justified and satisfied by their honest performance, by the best methods that applied science up to date has furnished, of the duties of public transportation, he proposes from this standpoint to examine: first, Mr. Hudson's indictment as a whole, passing thereafter—as far as the limits of a single paper will allow—to the particulars exhibited.

According to Mr. Hudson, the railways of the United States either "dominate" at present, or propose sooner or later to "dominate," the republic. How? By being "gigantic monopolists," says Mr. Hudson. And how do they become gigantic monopolists? By being gigantic corporations, controlled by men of altogether too enormous private fortunes. Now, we have always known that a railway was a corporation, and that some of our railways might fairly be called "gigantic." But there is not one of these "gigantic" corporations which is, in any sense of the term known to dictionaries at least, a monopoly. To be exactly all-fours with the lexicographers, the only railways in the Union which are monopolies are countable on the fingers of one hand, and must be as insignificant in extent, capitalization, importance of terminals and every other characteristic, as they are in number. Everybody knows that a shipper or traveler from New York to any point in the United States has an abundant choice of routes before him. Whether his objective be Buffalo, New Orleans,