Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/170

158 defend it against the grantor himself in the grantor's own courts—these are the least of the burdens which this once granted and quickly terminated privilege of eminent domain is supposed to impose, and practically does impose, upon railway companies. Admitting their public character—even such a character is, perhaps, not morally a deterrent to the rights of their stockholders to get the interest on their investment; or otherwise a displacement of the unwritten law of meum and tuum. Railroads, by the uniform decisions of half a century, are indeed public conveniences. But, so far, this character of a public convenience has been only a burden, never a blessing, or even a shield. The man who steals a ride on a railway-train and imputes it to himself for sin would be a curiosity. The railway company has no conscience-fund; and, had it, there would be no contributors. It may submit to robbery, may carry for less than the cost of the service, and so plunder its stockholders to its heart's content, and Mr. Hudson and his clique have no protest to put on record. But if under all this load the railway company succumbs to bankruptcy, Mr. Hudson, from his elastic standpoint (or rather from his lack of any standpoint whatever) is enabled to cite this very bankruptcy as another instance of the hostility and danger of railways to the republic. He has charged them with being enemies to the public, firstly, because of their tariffs. He charges them, secondly, with being public enemies because of the bankruptcy which a failure to collect those tariffs has brought upon them; and yet again, thirdly—when that bankruptcy has made the stock nominal in value and so speculative, and a shrewd operator absorbs it and so lays the foundation of a private fortune—Mr. Hudson still charges the railways with being public enemies because the far-seeing operator has accumulated this very private fortune! Moreover, he lumps the whole catena of cause and effect into a series of indictments (or, more absurdly still, into a series of specifications under a single indictment against railways as a class or an institution), and proposes as a relief from the whole—what? Why, that the Government confiscate (or purchase by way of condemnation) these railways, and make them a public highway upon which any one may run his own rolling-stock on payment of a trackage-fee!

I know what the railways of this continent are, what services they perform. I know that, by vigilant watch for and adoption of the latest triumphs of engineering and mechanical skill, and by employment of the costliest of expert assistance, they have reduced the percentage of accident to a minimum, and the chances of loss of life to a fraction so small that it is actually a mathematical truth to assert that a man is safer in a railway-train running at full speed than in his bed, or in any other spot on this most precarious globe! What these railways could become if operated upon Mr. Hudson's plan I can not question; the details of that picture I can not, for one, fill in. I know not what terminal facilities, what time-tables, or what percentage of slaughter