Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 19.pdf/215

 THE GREEN BAG lands which axe increasingly jealous of the mighty republic of the North. Jealousy sleeps and dreams, but it never dies." PUBLIC POLICY. "Municipal Control of Public Utilities," by Oscar Lewis Pond, Columbia University Press, 1906. RAILROADS. Interstate Commerce Acts Indexed and Digested by Charles S. Hamlin, Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1907. This volume includes the text of the Carrier's Liability Act, the Safety Appliance Act, the Act Requiring Reports of Accidents, the Arbitration Act and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and other Acts of Congress, and indices for each. RAILWAY REGULATION. "Long-haul Legislation and Law-writing, Being Reflections upon a New Work on Railroad Rate Legisla tion," is the title which Charles E. Grinnell gives to his review in the American Law Re view (V. xli, p. 1 ) of Beale & Wyman's recent book on Railroad Rate Regulation. Mr. Grin nell is very appreciative of the work as a whole, but he is far from joining the authors when they say: " It can be predicted with confidence that there will be further advance along these lines until a complete system for fixing rates by governmental authority in place of the rates set aside will be established by legislation." Mr. Grinnell says: "But more than one side can play at the game of prophecy even in predicting the ups, downs, and sideway developments of law, con stitutional, statutory, and common. The busi ness most important to our country is the business which is succeeding. This is as impor tant to the poor as to the rich. Successful men aje as honest as unsuccessful men, taken as classes. "It is more important that the railroads of the country should be profitable to their stock holders and their bondholders and other cred itors and their tenants and their landlords and their officers and other employees, than that all their customers who ship goods and all their passengers should succeed in getting per fect equality in terms. The most of those shippers, customers, and passengers know and believe this substantially, and practice accord ing to it in their own private business, public as well as private; but they fight for what they can get, not with the temporarily disinterested

motives of an author while writing before deal ing with a publisher, but permanently with their own private interests controlling their declarations concerning public calling. "Not pure theory nor absolute justice to any one person is the practicable solution of questions how the government shall treat the private grantees of a public franchise. Ele ments come into the reckoning which require compromise, logical or illogical though it be. The political problem is wisely indicated by Judge Noyes, who, when discussing how to deal with unjust rates, says, ' The feeling of impotency upon the part of the shipper is a real evil. It is not vitally important whether in fact unjust charges be many or few. It is important that the shipper should have an opportunity of presenting the justice of the charge complained of in an expeditious way to a disinterested tribunal. The existence of a remedy might do more to allay popular appre hension than any possible resort to it.' "The last sentence is a wiser suggestion as to political and legislative probabilities than the prediction that we are face to face with the alternative of the minute regulation by govern ment or the public ownership of railroads." TORTS (see Labor Litigation). TRUST REGULATION. " The Standard Oil Anti-Trust Complaint," by Richard W. Hale, in the American Law Review (V. xli, p. 51), is a detailed examination of the case of the United States of America against the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, John D. Rockefeller and many other individuals and corporations, brought in the Circuit Court of the United States for the Eastern Division of the Eastern Judicial District of Missouri. The note of con trol, not destruction, of trusts is struck in his conclusion : "The grievance, the cry of monopoly, the complaint that because the company is big, and although its acts are lawful, yet it is so big that it is illegal and criminal, is based upon a fallacy. It is as hopeless to-day to compete against the circumstances that oil can be better refined or beef better prepared for the market in a great factory or by a great concern than over a chemist's stove or in a retail butcher shop as it ever was for Mrs. Partington to try to mop up the Atlantic. Such bigness is not criminal, it is an economic fact. Such a strik