Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/612

590 allusion to the riots of 1877 in lurid juxtaposition with the French Revolution; but—since, wherever planted, the roots of neither of these cataclysms lie in land-grants, construction companies, pools, rebates, or fast-freight lines—it need not detain us here. I have not touched in this paper upon the "Granger" cases (so called), my limits forbidding. But I do not understand that the principles enunciated in them conflict with any of the statements I have made. I lately had the pleasure of perusing a learned article in an English magazine which proposed that railway companies, like post-office departments, make rates independently of distances or extent of services rendered; or at least establish two rates, "one for short distances and others for long distances: so much for every distance not exceeding one hundred miles, so much for every distance between one hundred and three hundred miles, and so much for all distances exceeding three hundred miles, keeping the one rate for all distances in view as the ultimate object." It seems to me that, if gentlemen who write in this fashion expect their papers to be read, they expect all they are entitled to. Similarly, I think that Mr. Hudson's loving treatment of the ancient claim that, since railways are public highways, any citizen has a right to send his own limited express along the line at any moment on payment of a trackage-fee, ought to stamp the value of his criticism. But since many of his terrors do very widely obtain among conscientious men, I have thought to attempt to allay them. Mr. Hudson's book is printed on better paper and more nicely bound than the usual socialistic attack upon things as they are. But that he is, or is destined to become, the long-looked-for reformer of the American railroad, I fear can hardly be hoped.



E were not fortunate with our plant-hunting on Mount Washington. Perhaps, for want of a local botanist to show us the lurking-places of the rarer species, we did not succeed in finding all of them. But some of the most interesting to a British naturalist could be gathered everywhere without the trouble of seeking. When the little, puffing, oblique locomotive that drags you up from Marshfield to the summit stopped awhile to rest and refresh itself after its steep climb up Jacob's Ladder, we jumped out eagerly upon the surface of the mountain; and there, among the erratic bowlders of the Great Ice Age, I lighted at once upon broad beds of two plants my eyes had never before beheld in the living state—one, a pretty tufted White Mountain sandwort, and the other a beautiful bright golden avens. So thickly did they cover the ground on that high shoulder of the