Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/611

Rh the result being, that while railroads are not philanthropic or charitable bodies, organized for good works among the poor and needy, they are not basilisks, or gorgons, or minotaurs, destroyers of the state or dragons that feed upon the people. And now we might well leave Mr. Hudson and all his works, were not his lack of standpoint just here so ludicrous as to tempt from us a further word. He cries (page 9), "Railway projectors have invariably embarked in these enterprises, not so much for the public welfare as for their own private enrichment." What else had Mr. Hudson been led to suppose? The millennial state in which private enterprises are conducted for public ends is certainly not yet a State in the Federal Union, wherever else on this planet it may be discovered. Mr. Hudson's next proposition is that, "if the country has had hundreds of millions added to its wealth by railway construction, the builders have also secured tens of millions for their individual fortunes." In any but the millennial state one would think that a free gift to the commonwealth of ninety percentum of one's profits was a rather liberal tithe, and an exceedingly handsome thing. Most private parties, certainly most governments, would open their coffers to their friends on the same terms. But Mr. Hudson is ashamed to think that private capital, enterprise, patience, and labor should have been returned anything. Clearly, the Government should take fully cent per cent for the industry of its subjects.

"While the nation has gained in wealth and population by the general extension of railways," says Mr. Hudson, "it does not follow that the wealth could not have been more justly distributed if railway management had been universally governed by the principles of equity" (page 8). What wealth? Mr. Hudson was just now complaining that the entire benefit did not go to Government, and that the individual received ten per cent. Now he regrets that it was not even more widely distributed among individuals. What are Mr. Hudson's views as to the meaning of the word "equity"? Would "equity" have been subserved if the ten per centum or the hundred per centum were distributed by lot, or on a basis of pauperism, or covered at once into the treasury of the republic? The statements that "the equality of all persons is denied by the discriminations of the corporations which the Government has created"; that "under them the increase of national wealth is not distributed among all classes according to their industry and prudence, but is concentrated among those who enjoy the favor of the railway power"; and that by means of railways "general independence and self-respect are made impossible" (page 9), may perhaps be passed over with the remark that if Mr. Hudson himself believed in propositions as silly as these, to argue with him at all would be like reading Herbert Spencer to the Salvation Army.

It is a bonne bouche to bring into the discussion at this point an