Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/226

214 the act to, in its judgment, follow up a recalcitrant railway company.

The inventors of the act of Interstate Commerce designed it to cheapen freights to the people by compelling railways to sharply compete, and to relieve the country from what were claimed to be discriminations, and to adjust local inequalities. They put the act upon the statute-book. But—by a strange deliverance of affairs—none of these objects were accomplished. No sooner did the act become law than it operated to relieve the railways from competition, increased freights, and shifted, without lifting or adjusting, what were called "discriminations." But, while powerless to advance the objects for which its projectors had fondly drafted and urged it, the act did accomplish one great good and one not local, as were the grievances, if any, it was framed to remedy, but a national and general good, which it is needless to say its framers and proponents never dreamed of subserving. That national good was nothing less than the appreciating of American railway securities in the European exchanges.

I am not exactly certain that the railway companies themselves foresaw this result when they yielded so prompt and unanimous an obedience to the Interstate Commerce Act, but it is indisputable that this acquiescence and obedience brought about this happy desideratum. It has not been unsuspected that, just as the past few years have seen the "Trust" devised by capital to meet and offset and checkmate the waste and unreasonableness of the labor-unions, so the railway companies, upon finding the popular opposition to them crystallizing into a Federal statute, by a single coup turned the statute itself into an aegis, and made it (as the old maxim says of the device of a mortgage) a shield as well as a sword. But, however this may have been, the immediate result was as I have said. The European investor, who had often looked askance at American railway securities, because he had somehow absorbed a notion that our United States railway companies were more or less unregulated by statute, and so more or less lawless, upon seeing them brought under Federal regulation (always with his old-time ideas of the paternal and constabulary benefits of government control), did not hesitate to bestow upon our railway securities the confidence with which he already regarded our Government securities. As I have said, it is an open question whether the railroad companies themselves foresaw this result; but it remains another and a very curious cumulative instance of how (as I have before noted) the Interstate Commerce Act worked upon the railway companies, much as the prophet Baalam is related to have worked upon the children of Israel. He was employed to curse them, but he blessed them superlatively.

But if the policy of Federal regulation of railroads is to be