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216 companies, who are only persons (or at the most common carriers in the eye of the common law), certainly they are entitled as persons that statutes passed to regulate them as railway companies should be definite, fixed, single, and certain. It is as abhorrent to justice that a corporation, or a railway corporation, as it is that a natural person, should be compelled by law to act at his peril. But the situation is exactly this: Anomalous and intolerable and abhorrent to justice as it may appear, our United States railway companies are compelled by law to act at their peril. For every single one of our forty-four sovereign States, and about all of the Territories, have copious and dictatory statutes concerning railways, and these statutes are in every case to be added to—not held appealable to or reconcilable with, but collaterally additional to—the Act of Interstate Commerce! And each governed and regulated railway company must either select some course of procedure which shall contain some three or four, some larger or smaller, groups of these State and Federal statutes, or else disobey one or more groups of them at its peril; or in almost every possible case presented to it for its discretion institute suit for a construction of all these statutes in each particular case, and carry it to the court of highest resort, the Supreme Court of the United States! Indeed it is only, as I have said, because the Interstate Commerce Commission has thus far been composed of gentlemen and jurists who have used the utmost personal judgment, conservatism, and leniency in administering the statute, that every railway company in the land has not been driven to one or the other of these procedures (and this not once but hundreds or thousands of times* almost daily, in fact),viz., either to flatly disobey, or else to maintain a suit up to the Supreme Court of the United States. But from the calmness and conservatism of a tribunal as once, at present or at any one time constituted, unhappily no warrant for the future or for any other time can be drawn. A change of personnel, always possible, might ingraft or enforce a new policy at a moment's notice, with what results nobody could predicate or prophesy. But one can always state that, in whatever form the result came, it would amount to an interruption of public business and of the course of commerce.

Now, there are two remedies for this state of things: one of which has been urged before, and by a no means inconsiderable or thoughtless or turbulent or revolutionary element of the population; and the other of which has been certainly suggested, though not, as I am aware, ever very seriously discussed. The first remedy is the purchase and operation of the railways by the Government; and the second is either the abolition of State railway statutes and of State Boards of Railway Commissioners, or else the making of the Federal Board of Interstate Commerce an appellate