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Rh promised a still more enlarged—prosperity. Not only was it found impossible for the moment to equate rates, or to know what to charge the public for railway service, but among the railway companies themselves it was impossible to contract or hold each other to their agreements, covenants, or mutual obligations. Moreover, every or any insignificant local railway in the land (of five or ten miles long, or even of less) might and did solicit and accept freight to any point in the United States, Canada, or Mexico at arbitrary rates—deliver the freight at the end of its haul to other, and this to yet other, lines—so finally forwarding that freight to its destination at a rate absolutely prohibitive to a trunk line extending directly from the shipping to the destinative point of that very freight; and this from motives, not of competition, but of, say, jealousy, or looking to the depreciation of securities, and so of ultimate absorption, or control, or "wrecking" of the trunk line. Into this confusion stepped the State railway boards, each lending a hand, until for a time it seemed as if the business of railroading was about the most undesirable and unprofitable of employments not only, but a sort of punishment in itself. In short, it was as a last gasp, or a forlorn hope, that the railway companies, to save themselves, invented "pools," and begged acquiescence in them of the short local lines—in the hope of being able to earn their operating expenses, and possibly a prophetic fraction of their fixed charges. Imagine their consternation at an act of Congress which appeared and prohibited pooling!

What the railway companies or the national credit would have done, had it not been for the first important decision of the Interstate Commerce Commission (known as the Louisville and Nashville decision), it is impossible to conjecture. That decision, coming at the right time, declared that, while the text of the act forbade "pools" or "discriminations," or "the charging more for a short than a long haul," the spirit of the act was to do the railway companies as well as the shippers justice under the circumstances of each case. In short, that circumstances must control.

Under, I say, that benign decision, the railways have been able to exist and to prosper and pay their fixed charges. The "Gentlemen's Agreement"—nothing more or less than a series of "pools," called "associations"—only created by a sort of national instead of local consent (that is, by the principal railways acting as a unit instead of by groups of railways here and there grouped by local or competitive considerations), has enabled the interest on American railway securities to be met abroad, and so the national credit maintained in the sensitive European markets, and all for the time has been well. The expense, to be sure, has been borne by the people—the shippers. There has been a