Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/236

224 to decree the building of another railway between two other points; and as the one would be impossible, so the other would be absurd.

For all that is said about superfluous and over-railway construction, I confess that I would like to hear mentioned the one of our five hundred United States railway lines which is superfluous, or which the community which is served by it would consent to have torn up or to otherwise dispense with. I have myself cajoled, argued, and fought for rights of way, and finally brought condemnation and sundry other legal proceedings in order to construct a railway; but, once constructed, I think it would be dangerous to limb or life to suggest a discontinuance of that railway to the very people who once resisted, to their last extremity, its location.

The people of the United States are indebted to their railways in a sense which obtains in no other country on this planet. To say that the railways have turned forests into farms and made the desert blossom as the rose does not express this obligation. It is a greater one than that. To the United States as to no other nation the railways have brought wealth by a present realization of prospective revenues so enormously as to quite amount to an actual creation of values. In other countries railways have been built when populations demanded them, or could not exist longer without them—when great cities were to be brought together and great industries to be served. In the United States the railways have preceded and created the demand, the interests, the cities themselves.

The percentage in error of judgment is at least no greater in the promoting of railway enterprises than in any other branch of human procedure. Nor is it impossible to argue that even a forced railway construction—where actually no demand can be premised, no interests subserved, where no capital seeks legitimate investment, and no traffic exists, and for only ulterior purposes (such as "selling out")—is entirely a disadvantage to a community. Even the debentures of such a railway are not a public burden. For, while a promise to pay value is not perhaps a creation of value at the start, if interest be paid upon that promise and it is finally funded and ultimately paid in cash, it becomes a contribution to the public wealth (however meanwhile that promise or the guarantee of it may work criticism or prophecy of national ruin, or the elocution of the agitator or the communist about bloated or unhealthy private fortunes and the like). Large views and considerations of "the long run," do not, I think, warrant any paternal surveillance over private capital or the laws of supply and demand. What is wanted is either a surcease of railway commissions, Federal, State, and Territorial, in the United States,