Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/836

818 issue, or to say of any fact concerning commerce or transportation that it would necessarily be wholly irrelevant in such a controversy. Yet the parties defendant, when such a case is heard before the Interstate Commerce Commission or the courts of the United States, are the carriers between Chicago and New York only. When the interdependence of all rates is thoroughly understood and the extent and importance of this condition fully appreciated, it will be a matter of little surprise that through the absence of sufficiently comprehensive information in particular cases, and through the impracticability of treating the subject of railway rates under the present system in the broad and thorough manner absolutely essential to the correction of the evils now existing, even the clear-headed and able men who have constituted the Interstate Commerce Commission have been led into occasional errors which have furnished arguments to those who from self-interest desire a return to the system in vogue when there was no public supervision of interstate commerce by rail.

The conflict of interest between the several corporate units of the railway system is the primary cause of the evils attendant upon railway transportation as now conducted. This fact being clearly established, it is at once evident that that portion of the Interstate Commerce law which was intended to perpetuate competition—i. e., the fifth or antipooling section—is radically antagonistic to any wise and practicable system of railway regulation. It is necessary at the outset, as a first step toward a system under which railway rates can be made equal to all, that this restraint upon the carriers should be removed—not in order to save them from the bankruptcy that is almost certain to follow the vicious methods now in vogue; not for the sake of the thousands whose small savings have been invested in railway securities in the reasonable belief that Congress would not legislate so as to destroy an investment through which private capital is made to perform a public function, but in order to relieve individuals, classes of property, and localities from the unjustly discriminating charges for railway service from which they now suffer. At the same time Congress should give some substantial finality to the findings of the board of railway experts which under the name of the Interstate Commerce Commission it has created to adjudicate between the railways and their patrons, and should strengthen the visitorial functions of that body by granting what-ever amendments to the law are necessary in order to secure the production of all the legal testimony desired and by considerably widening the scope of its statistical investigations.

But this is only a beginning of progress toward more enlightened methods of dealing with this important industry. It has never been found profitable to legislate in restraint of natural