Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/230

218 think no sooner has a national bankruptcy act expired or been repealed, and the various State insolvency laws more or less taken its place, than the public credit has felt the change unfavorably, and the business interests of the community have clamored for the re-enactment or rehabilitation of the national statute. Now, if the Interstate Commerce Act stood alone, both the railway companies and the people would know exactly what was expected of each, independently and reciprocally. A codification of the procedure thereunder would place the whole simply at everybody's hand. The railway company would have no excuse for disobedience, and the aggrieved shipper would have not only his grievance but his remedy at his tongue's end. And not only would the shipper have a right to prosecute the company for disobedience or inadvertence or neglect or mistake, but the railway company might proceed against a recalcitrant shipper to compel him to obey the law: and this to the benefit not only of the railway company, but of his co-shipper or neighbor, to the quieting of all possible railway "discrimination."

If it is necessary in the present paper to demonstrate that as the Federal law stands, and as all these State and Territorial laws stand, neither of the great interests involved, neither the people nor the railways, can know where they stand, either independently or reciprocally, the demonstration is easily forthcoming.

To outline it as briefly as possible: At the appearance upon our statute-books of the act of Interstate Commerce, the art of railroading, in spite of all and singular the State statutes (some of them absolutely ridiculous, more of them unconstitutional, arbitrary, and penal, and almost prohibitive, and almost all of them inequitable to a large degree, as my prior papers have perhaps demonstrated), was rapidly approaching the state of an exact science. But, by the appearance of that act, this art or science of railroading was arrested and thrown back upon itself in a sort of "chaos by act of Congress." The enormous fixed or mortgage debts of the American railways—a large, perhaps the largest part of which was held in Europe (where, to a degree almost impossible to adequately describe to one not familiar with these matters, it involved the national credit itself)—had rendered the pooling system imperative. This pooling system had not been "sprung" by the railways upon the people, nor was it for the benefit of higher rates, or in the nature of a combination against trade, or of a "Trust." On the contrary, it had been evolved slowly—by long and costly experiments, and by extended deliberation on the part of the railway companies, and had expedited an absolute cheapening of freights, and a consequent impetus to manufactures, the reclamation of waste lands to agricultural purposes, and so had resulted in an unexampled—and