Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/158

 mere replica of the schoolboy fallacy: Food is necessary to life: Corn is food; ergo, corn is necessary to life (in which the undistributed middle is supposed to elude the urchin logician), and are altogether beside adult discussion of economical questions. But let Mr. Hudson's processes be waived while we address ourselves to the material of the charges he pastes and I assume that he pastes them correctly in his scrap-book:

I. The Long and Short Haul. There certainly never arose in practical railway operation a situation wherein a railway company was solicitous to charge less money for doing more work and to pay its own expenses meanwhile. But in practical railway policy a difference between the cost and the value of certain business to the company might, and sometimes does, arise which appeals to the company's instinct of self-preservation too despotically to be disregarded. A railway company, which has for long years acceptably served its local and through patrons, finds itself suddenly paralleled by a rival company, serving all or some of the same localities not only, but prepared as a part of its (the second comer's) investment to undergo the expense of "cutting" rates, and so to supplant the first comer by offering to take business for less than the actual expense of doing it, even though some of the competing points are farther distant from the common terminals of the paralleled line than the actual length of the roads. Under such circumstances, the value of all of its original business it could retain would be clearly of more value to the first company than the then present cost of doing it: and the result would, of course, by every law of human economy or of human nature, be that the first company would either anticipate or respond to the "cut." The effect in either case would be to cheapen tariffs to the shipper to the people. But Mr. Hudson, at this moment, does not care for the people. Later on he will take up the cudgels for them, but just now he kindly holds a brief for the railroads. He thinks it shameful that deserving and hard-working railroads should be obliged to take long hauls for actually less than they are legally entitled to charge for short hauls for much smaller distances. Mr. Hudson has no objection, of course, to one of his fellow-countrymen riding from New York to Chicago for five dollars, or shipping livestock from Toledo to Buffalo at one dollar a car-load during a railway war. (Or, if he should still remember the poor public, it will be not the poor public who ride a thousand miles for five dollars, or at the rate of half a cent a mile, but the poor public who commonly ride one hundred and sixty-seven miles for five dollars, thereby being compelled to either walk or pay the legal mileage of three cents which the company is allowed by law to charge.) But should the railway companies find that carrying passengers from New York to Chicago for five dollars, or cattle from Toledo to Buffalo at one dollar a car-load does not pay that by making such rates they are robbing not the public at large, perhaps, but their own stock