Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/687

Rh believed to be moved, like other commercial enterprises, to seek the convenience and approval of their patrons, they have been forced to construct depots in towns of a certain size, no matter whether business warranted it, to arrange the movement of trains on connecting lines to save a traveler from delay, and to post bulletins to acquaint the impatient public with belated trains and the hour of their arrival. It is assumed by another class of legislation that they revel in the destruction of life and property and the persecution of their employees. One State at least requires the erection of stage planks or the use of trucks for the reception of baggage. In another, locomotives must be armed with lookouts to warn heedless trespassers, and in case of injury or death the company must prove affirmatively that it was not guilty of negligence. In still other States it is provided that there shall be no reduction of salary without a month's notice, no discharge of employees without reasons, if demanded, and no record, or black list, of incompetents or rascals. Even the establishment of relief departments, to which no one is obliged to contribute, is prohibited. To show still further that railroads have no rights that the high-minded legislator is bound to respect, it is provided by one law that they shall pay the charges of other carriers on freight delivered to them; by a second, that they shall issue passes to shippers of certain commodities; and by a third, not confined to railroads, that they shall not employ detectives or other persons to discover dishonesty or to protect their property from the destruction of rioters. In so humane an age as the present, thieves would hardly be refused a privilege so unquestionably just.

As yet but two other classes of corporations outside of elevator and railroad companies have been denied the right to fix the price of their services. This baleful movement of democratic despotism has overtaken telegraph and telephone companies, and threatens the gas and street-car companies. The corporations still free from it have not, however, escaped the blasting solicitude of the social reformers. The owners of mills, factories, and mines have suffered severely from it. But if their hours of toil have been shortened to the verge of disaster; if their discipline of the careless and incompetent has been modified to the point of impotency; if they have had to put up their buildings and to guard their machinery in prescribed ways, not always the wisest; if, in a word, they have been bound and gagged by regulations that rival those with which Colbert throttled the industries of France, the story of their oppression is too much like that of the railroads to need recital. Of more interest because more novel is the oppression of the insurance companies, which, like the railroads, require ability and character of the highest order, and a special knowledge that few legislators take the trouble to master.