Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/609

Rh this republic—whose enemies, Mr. Hudson will have us believe, all railways are. Nor is it a figure of speech to say, in this case not only, but in every case of a railroad upon which a mortgage is spread, that so far from the railway being the enemy, it is the creature of the republic, for the republic is the people, and the people, by owning the securities of a railway, own the railway itself. Mr, Hudson may fire the popular heart of the non-investor by his periods; but if, per-chance, he desires more than this, he can not yet claim to have found either a place to stand, or a fulcrum for his lever.

II. Pools are combinations of railways at once with and against each other, never against the public, or (if Mr. Hudson prefers) the republic. The name is unfortunate, as suggesting a pot or lump, whereas, in fact, the pool is an elaborate system of differentiation and equating, by which railroads practically pay into the pool, not their lumped receipts, but percentages thereof. These pools are the legitimate and necessary results of the rechartering over and over again of railway companies to transact business between the same points, by paralleling each other. So long as the people in their Legislatures will thus charter parallel lines serving identical points—thus dividing territory they once granted entire—it is not exactly clear how they can complain if the lines built (by money invested if not on the good faith of the people, at least in reliance upon an undivided business) combine to save themselves from bankruptcy. Without such combination the strongest company must bankrupt and "gobble" the others, which survival of the fittest would be exactly what Mr. Hudson declaims and deprecates—a Monopoly; and this time a most grasping and cruel one, since the first aim of the surviving road must logically be to recoup itself for the tremendous expenses of the "gobble" by extravagant overcharges! Had a pooling system existed at the date of its birth, the Standard Oil Company octopus could never have grown up. And it is interesting reading—as Joe Gargery would say—to find our Mr. Hudson snarling on one page at railways because they render such monopolies as the Standard Oil Company possible, and, on the next, cursing pools as against public interest. And not only are pools safeguards against private monopolies, but, as against the "tie-up" and the boycott, bound to become the needed, possibly the only, antidote if not the only relief, possible. Individuals may, and no doubt do, from geographical conditions, suffer from the absence of competition which pools guarantee. Doubtless a shipper at Buffalo could make better terms to New York were five trunk lines engaged in the suicidal pastime of cutting each other's throats. But the greatest good of the greatest number is subserved by an honest rate, and that the pool secures to it.

III. Construction companies are conservers of time and capital at once to the public and to the railway-builder. If a railway between two given points be needed at all, it is needed as soon as possible.