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150 to the greatest number, but the least good to the greatest number (or, possibly, the greatest good to the least number), so that the selected village is favored. But what else would this be, again, but a monopoly of commercial privileges; and how soon did the railway or the railways adopt Mr. Hudson's suggestion and discriminate exclusively in favor of his village—before Mr. Hudson would be on his feet again with an entirely new compilation of grievances, demanding to know why this particular village was selected out of the entire continent to be so pre-eminently favored? Does not even Mr. Hudson begin to catch a glimpse of just how vast, how complicated, and inexhaustible this railway problem really is? But possibly he does not, for he says, You charge this village of B too much. No, we charge everybody according to geographical position; it saves us labor to do so, says Mr. Alexander. Well, anyhow, says Mr. Hudson, you lowered the rate to A, and did not lower the rate to B, and that's the act of a public enemy; and he straightway sits down and inflicts us with a book of 500 pages, of which the argument is (or ought to be, to be consistent) that A is not the public or even the republic, whereas B is both the one and the other. If Mr. Hudson will kindly turn to one of his own pages (in which possibly the mass of excerpta has bewildered him), he will be doubtless surprised to find (page 159) an admission that, astounding as it may seem, on a single trunk-line in a single year, as between the anti-pool rates of 1865 and the pool rates of 1882, a saving to the public, in freights alone, of $318,947,486,261 has been effected. But, having made the admission, he is ready to meet it after his kind. "This is an astonishing instance," he continues, "of giving away what the giver never owned or possessed; the fact is kept out of sight that the business of 1882 is the result of the progressive reduction of rates for many years, and could never have existed but for the reductions." Surely, the readers of "The Popular Science Monthly" have never witnessed quite such a wiping out of the laws of supply and demand as this! Mr. Hudson will have us believe that the people of the United States on the line of the given railroad would not have eaten and drunk, or purchased supplies, worn clothes or slept on beds, and that population itself for seventeen years would have suspended its rules—perhaps the laws of gravitation themselves have ceased—had not this railroad reduced its rates. But let us overlook any possible increase of population or of the wants or luxuries of a given territory in the space of twenty-two years, and consider this particular railway company as all railways. The argument will then remain as follows: Railways are public enemies because they are exorbitant in their charges. But figures show that their charges are constantly decreasing. Never mind that, says Mr. Hudson, if railways reduce their rates they only do so from the selfish motive of getting still more business. Most shippers over a railway would be contented if the railway would only charge them low rates. But Mr. Hudson (who, possibly, is not a shipper over