lief would in many cases be far from concluding the labors of the commission in respect to the equities involved: for questions of rates assume new forms, and may require to be met differently from day to day: and in those sections of the country in which the reasons or supposed reasons for exceptional rates are most prevalent, the commission would, in effect, be required to act as rate-makers for all the roads, and compelled to adjust the tariffs so as to meet the exigencies of business while at the same time endeavoring to protect relative rights and equities of rival carriers and rival localities." "This [and here is a touch of nature which shows, at any rate, that an interstate commissioner's life threatened at the very outset to be no bed of roses] in any considerable state would be an enormous task. In a country so large as ours, and with so vast a mileage, it would be superhuman. A construction of the statute which should require its performance would render the due administration of the law altogether impracticable" (p 5) says the commission finally. And yet if the Interstate Commerce Act means anything, it means just what the commissioners, in their first decision, declared to be impracticable, -superhuman and impracticable! Here are seven commissioners, at a salary of seven thousand five hundred dollars per annum, launched with an appropriation of one hundred thousand dollars from the people's treasury, and on that equipment expected to supervise the hourly business of a continent at present in the hands of perhaps a couple of thousand auditors, with a combined staff of a hundred thousand clerks and agents-with salaries ranging from twenty thousand dollars downwards, and overworked at that! But to proceed with examination of the opinion. Having frankly admitted that to endeavor to discharge the functions it was organized to administer would be superhuman and an impossible task, the commission sets to work, as in duty bound, to find something to do. It is legally bound to assume that it was created for a possible purpose, to do something not superhuman. And so the commission, groping, as it frankly admits, in the dark, strikes at last upon the clause, "under substantially similar circumstances and conditions," and finds at last a foothold. Surely, it says, "if the

carrier... shall depart from the general rule, . . . if the circumstances and conditions of the two hauls are dissimilar, the statute is not violated." Clearly, if Congress shall take the grocery trade under its jurisdiction, and declare that the poor man must not be obliged to pay more per pound for his two pounds of sugar than the dealer pays per pound for his two thousand hogsheads, it would put an end to the wholesale grocery business on the instant. But if Congress says that this rule shall only apply to the sugar made "under substantially similar circumstances and conditions," then the sugar trade may go on in peace, as before, relying on the immutable truth that no like transactions are or can be under the same circumstances and conditions, and foregoing to attempt the superhuman task' of taking evidence all over the continent,— from the planters, the cultivators, the harvesters of the sugar-crop, the teamsters who carried it to the railroad, the shipper, the booking clerk, the carrying company, and so forth and so on, down through the jobber, the wholesaler, to the consumer or the messenger sent to pay the twenty or twenty-five cents for the brown paper parcel,—in perfect faith that in no two cases can the adjective clause 'substantially similar' he predicated to any one transaction when collated with any other transaction on record. Certainly the commission is right. Indeed, the wonderful part of the opinion is in the exact legal consistency and candor with which it admits that the law is one, which, if logical, is impossible of enforcement: and, if illogical, can only be administered by leaving matters precisely as they were before the law was passed! Following the above line of reasoning, the commission declares (p. 6) that the statute becomes practical, and may be enforced without serious embarrassment. The commission, having settled this much, now proceeds to collate the two sections of the Act which relate to the long and short haul (Sections 2 and 4), and proceeds. "It is not at all likely that Congress would deliberately in the same act, and when dealing with the same general subject, make use of a phrase which was not only carefully chosen and peculiar, but also controlling, in such different senses that its effect as used in one place upon the conduct of the parties who were to be reg

ulated and controlled by it would be essentially different from what it was as used in another" (p. 7). And therefore the commission renders its decision in a sentence which I must be pardoned for putting in italics: "Beyond question, the carrier must judge for itself what are the substantially similar circumstances and conditions. . . on peril of the consequences" (p. 7). But is not this what every carrier (nay, every business-man) does, has always done, and always will do to the end of time? And is not this a pronouncement from the mouth of the Interstate Commission itself, that if the clause 'under substantially similar circumstances and conditions' is of the essence of the Act, then the law is a nullity?

But after having arrived, by application of every rule of law, and the legal construction of statutes,—that is to say, by irresistible logic, to its conclusion on p. 7, the commission proceeds for twenty-two pages more to discuss analytically and still logically the situation. What situation? The case submitted by the petitioner, the Louisville and Nashville Railway Company, was simply the case which arises every moment of the day to any railroad company which carries freight for hire; and while considerable percentage of these cases are not necessarily interstate' in their character, yet every practical railroad man (certainly every student of political economy) knows that such a character, from a commercial standpoint, could be given to almost every one of them without any difficulty. The remaining twenty-two pages of this startling opinion-startling in that it is a confession at the outset that the Interstate Commerce Act cannot change the situation without discontinuing the business and commercial transactions of the people of the United States-is merely an analytical examination of the reciprocal relations which arises between a shipper and a carrier in any contract of transportation.

The commission proceeds to lay down the following propositions, which it deduces from the case before it and the evidence taken :

"1st, That the support and maintenance of a railroad ought properly to be borne by the local traffic for which it is supposed to be built, and the through traffic may justly be carried for any sum not below the costs of its own transportation.

"2d, That the cost of local traffic is greatest, and the charges for carrying it should be in proportion; and, if they are so, they will often result in the greater charge for the shorter haul.

"3d, That traffic carried long distances will much of it become impossible if charged rates corresponding to those which may properly be imposed on local traffic; and it must therefore be taken in recognition of the principle accepted the world over, that the traffic must be charged only what it will bear.

"4th, That the long hauls at low rates tend to build up manufactures and other industries without injury to the traffic upon which rates are heaviest.

"5th, That charges on long hauls which are less than the charges on shorter hauls over the same line, in the same direction, are commonly charges which the carriers do not voluntarily fix, but which are forced upon them by a competition from whose compulsion there is practically no escape."

Since the above propositions are axioms in railway management, and since, however immutable, axiomatic, and eternal they arewere before there was any Interstate Commerce Act or Interstate Commerce Commission, and will be after both have been numbered among the figments of the past; since the commission is not supposed to be organized for the purpose of ruling that black is black, and white is white,-what was left for the commission to say to the railroads of the United States except, "Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled, you have done nothing worthy of death or of bonds, you have conserved the best interests of the people, have built up a continent, and are worthy of the highest praise?" That is precisely what it does say, for it unhesitatingly adds, "On the construction we give to the statute, these several applications need not have been filed, and therefore they might now be withdrawn without further judgment" (p. 8). But the commission remembered the Act upon which it was created, and that it was expected to justify at least the action of Congress in creating it, and so announced its willingness to go into the merits of the question (it had just decided that there was no question), making its excuse, "that it is

manifestly important to the public interest, as well as to that of the railways themselves, that mistakes shall be as far as possible avoided" (p. 9),-(a proposition to which certainly nobody can demur); or to limit these propositions, or discover anywhere a public need or benefit that the management of the railways of the country have overlooked. How should the situation be changed to benefit the people? How can it be changed without destroying our interstate commerce; nay, without destroying the welfare of the country and paralyzing all business transactions? "Every railroad company," says the Commission, "ought, when it is practicable, so to arrange its tariffs that the burden upon freights shall be proportionate on all portions of its lines, with a view to revenue sufficient to meet all the items of current expense, including the costs of keeping up the road, buildings, and equipment, and of returning a fair profit to owners." But this is precisely what every railroad does, has always done, and always will do. To attempt to make tariffs other than proportionate would require an increasing of its book-keeping expenses, and of its auditing bureaus, to every railroad company, which would make it cheaper to go out of the business than to continue. In other words (the words of the opinion), "a railroad ought not to neglect any traffic of a kind that will increase its receipts more than its expenses" (p. 22). To state it frankly, therefore, the opinion of the commission, in the case of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company, is a benign approval of the business methods of our railroad companies which certainly merits the exclamation of King Balak over the efforts of the prophet Balaam.

And then the Commission repeats in detail its already general commendation of the railways of this Republic. It says that they may compete with Canadian railways (p. 22) and with the watercourses (p. 22). And the Commission therefore arrives at its rulings (p. 27), which (except that it interprets the short and long haul clause to mean that a question of fact is thereby substituted for a qnestion of law; and, inferentially, that to determine it the testimony of every individual in the employment of the railway must