Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/610

588 The construction company, by procuring the capital, obviates the delay of resorting to individual subscriptions, and the dilatoriness of small subscribers; and, by securing a rapid building and equipment of the desired road, serves the public by affording them early transportation facilities. And if, at the same time, it secures the stockholder and builder by relieving against the reasonable probability that a railroad built to develop new territory would pass into the bondholders' or into a receiver's hands before the territory could be developed, the benefit to the stockholders ought not reasonably to be considered an offset to the benefit to the shippers.

IV. Rebates and discriminations are neither peculiar to railways nor dangerous to the "republic." They are as necessary and as harmless to the former as is the chromo which the seamstress or the shopgirl gets with her quarter-pound of tea from the small tea-merchant, and no more dangerous to the latter than are the aforesaid chromos to the small recipients. The trouble Mr. Hudson finds with them is that the railway systematizes them instead of granting them at random or for sentimental reasons. The quasi-public character of railways, he thinks, should make these rebates illegal. The railway, in exchange for its right of eminent domain, should listen to the wants of the whole people instead of to individuals. Undoubtedly. But the whole people are not shippers over any one railroad; nor does any one railroad draw its revenue from the whole people. Of course, I am proceeding upon the supposition that the United States Government does not propose to become a gigantic railway corporation, and add to its legislative, judicial, and executive functions the operating of 125,379 miles of railway, with a funded debt of $3,669,115,722. Did "the republic" undertake such a task, does Mr. Hudson, after reading his own book, believe that there would be no rebates or discriminations extended to anybody for political, economical, or social purposes?

V. The subject of "fast-freight lines" might well be dismissed in the same breath, these being a financial consideration entirely between the companies and their stockholders. It may be noted, however, that they are public accommodations, affording to large parcels the safety, care, and prompt delivery which express companies afford to small ones, and that, like the express companies, they have grown to be public necessities. They not only secure the delivery of freight at destinations beyond the receiving line, but have introduced new amenities into civilization by distributing products. By their aid the New-Yorker finds daily on his table the fruits of California, or the glorious beef from Texas grazing; and the dweller in the lake-shore States his sea-food, as if each had changed places with the grower and gatherer. Nor do the figures show an increase, but, paradoxical as it may seem, a substantial decrease in tariffs on non-perishable freights by their means.

Stripped of declamation, this is all there is of Mr. Hudson's counts: