Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/478

462 that act is merely a proof that its framers overlooked the consequences of their hastily advised and badly considered procedure; were betrayed into regarding the popular hostility to railways from a political rather than from a patriotic standpoint, and so into the folly of precipitating a hard and fast rule upon an industry as delicate in its adjustments as it is massive in its ramifications; an industry of whose operations no single act or necessity of our sixty millions of people is independent; a rule so hard and so fast that were it attempted to be enforced (as a possible anarchist or socialist administration might see fit to enforce it) it would plunge the entire commerce and credit of this continent into chaos in twenty-four hours! To express the consequences, were it once literally carried into effect, the performances of the typical bull in a china-shop would be a notoriously inadequate figure (removal of a cataract from a human eye with a butcher's cleaver, or oiling the works of a Jurgensen watch by boiling it in axle-grease, might possibly better express the summary viciousness of the process).

So much for the Federal railway statute. As to the railway statistics of the several States, they have been comparatively innocuous—not so much from desuetude as from the general incapacity of their administrators. On the whole, their operation has been more largely comedy than tragedy—as where the Board of Railway Commissioners of one State have enacted that upper berths in railway-sleepers shall not be made up before the lower ones; that of another have found that if a rail way-bridge had fallen before a train reached it, instead of after the train had passed upon it, it would have been safer for the train; or that if a bridge had been known to be unsafe, a train would not have been run upon it at all. But that even State railway laws may be dangerous, I may note two very recent examples. The Board of Railway Commissioners of Mississippi have recently been given increased powers; have now authority to specify the description and size of station-houses which railway companies must build, and the point and location at which they must stand; to require the building of union passenger depots where two or more railroads connect, and to allot expenses of the same between the two or more companies compelled to pay for erecting them. This, in all conscience, seems to be going far enough. But the Iowa Board of Railroad Commissioners went still further, and not only regulated the question of accommodations, but actually furnished the railway companies with a schedule of the prices at which they must do the business which the people bring to them: that is to say—for the terms are convertible—the prices which the people shall be