Page:The truth about the railroads (IA truthaboutrailro00elli).pdf/140

Rh demand. The complaints come in for more freight-cars, for more passenger-trains, for better passenger-stations, for more side-tracks, for more switch-engines, for under-crossings and over-crossings in growing cities, for branch lines into new and undeveloped sections of the country; and every railroad west of the Mississippi must spend every year sums equivalent to from five to twenty per cent of its gross earnings for providing what is needed on the road already in existence,—not counting sums of money that must be raised for building branch lines and new lines. Would bureaucratic rate-fixing stop this complaint, or would it make it worse?

2. Complaints of the relation of rates between communities. The fact that communities are growing and strive each to outstrip the other in the West produces most energetic demands by mercantile organizations, commercial clubs, and other agencies that this town or that town have the rates so adjusted that it can enlarge its sphere of operation and diminish the territory of its rival community. Much of this Rh