Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/787



HE recent developments in the disgraceful squabble known as the "Erie Railway War," show the necessity for a thorough and radical change in our entire railway system. In the application of science to industrial enterprise, which so especially characterizes the nineteenth century, the railway is unquestionably the most important and valuable victory that the human race has made in its progress toward the mastery of matter, and consequently toward the gaining of its freedom. The discovery of steam, and its application to navigation and land travel, has in the nineteenth century laid the basis of the physical freedom of mankind, as the invention of printing in the fifteenth century laid the basis of its intellectual freedom.

The one secures the circulation of ideas, the other the circulation of men, of labor, of the results of productive industry; and from their united influence has arisen the spirit of unity which must eventually remove all the restraints of party and sectional prejudice, and of legislation in the interest of monopolies, until finally the harmony of interests becomes a reality of life, instead of a simple theory.

In this view of the railroad, its proper management becomes a matter of general interest; and the evils which recent events have shown afflict the Erie railway, are not simply an affair in which only the stockholders are interested. In order, however, to obtain a clearer idea of the necessity for a radical change in modern railway management, it may not be amiss to run a parallel between this system and that which, in the middle ages, controlled the roads which then subserved the needs of society for its circulation, and the exchange of its products. Perhaps, too, from the manner in which society freed itself from the evils which then afflicted the necessary circulation, we may derive a hint for the reformation needed now.

A baron, in the "good old times," generally perched his castle on some point contiguous to a frequented road, and then, by force of arms, levied a tax upon all merchandise travelling that way. The railway we generally find established when the already existing traffic shows there is a need for its increased facilities for transportation. Originally it may be built, as the road was, by the collective energies of the people who need it for their convenience; but, as the presence of constant traffic was, in feudal times, sure to develop some baron, who, either by main force, or on some specious pretext, took possession of the road, so we find the railway pass into the hands of capital, which taxes the traffic passing over it for its own benefit. In doing this, capital may often hold out the pretext of public advantage, but more generally it uses the simpler means of theft.

Any one who has looked into the history of our street railways will obtain a good insight into how this is done. The Legislature is bought, and the people are as much robbed of the valuable franchise which thus passes into the hands