be, that some of the more absurd among the high priced lawyers might object that this was unconstitutional; even that it was unconstitutional for the government to go into the railway business at all. And, by the time these interesting objections were heard at the court of last resort, a new party might have obtained the ascendancy in national counsel and the railroading craze of the government diverted from its purpose. On the whole, perhaps, it would be as well to recognize the organic grant of power, known as the constitution, and under subdivision of Section 8, which gives Congress power to regulate commerce between the States, enact a statute which should provide for purchasing the railways from their owners. But at what valuation? At actual cost or at such an appreciation thereof as would return a fair bonus to the projectors? The question of "stock watering" often the street slang for our capitalization and capitalization of increments or betterments, which are perfectly legitimate and often even patriotic-as where, for example, a trackless forest is added to the civilized and revenue gathering domain of the nation by a line of railways which by no course of possibility could pay its builders even their money back, and where over capitalization was the only possible inducement not only, but the only possible method of raising the money necessary to build-would confront the national purchaser just here. All these have been discussed to satiety. The fairest plan would seem to be, if the railways were to be purchased at all, to enact that, when any railroad company had paid its stockholders a certain agreed dividend for a certain number of years, then the government should purchase its entire line and plant, at a valuation of its stock based upon the payment of such dividends. If any plan were practicable I think this plan would be. And if any plan of Governmental railway purchase could ever be just and honest to the involuntary vendors I think this one might be made so. But even here the question would arise At what price should the government buy the subject? To buy an investment at its actual value is no benefit to the purchaser; and to buy it at less would be oppression to the seller. And, this question decided, how could the government, being

the purchaser, ascertain the value of what it purchased, and protect itself against the middlemen and brokers, the valuers and officials through whom the sale was made? And how could it prevent as many repetitions of what would be the most monumental of jobs from being repeated as often as would-be sellers of railroads could scent a profit, and so build to sell and build and build again; as, even without the glittering government purchaser in prospect, has been often enough done under our present circumstances?

But how could this justest of all the possible plans be carried out? Let us see. In the first place, the government could not purchase one railway without purchasing all. It might built or buy a line for employment in some one of its functions, of course, —but what we are now discussing is the thing apart from this. And the railways in the United States, all told number about four or five hundred, perhaps two tenths of which number are directly paralleling or competing roads, which the Government, in justice to itself, would have to reduce by taking up the tracks and otherwise obliterating-since the Government, could only buy to operate, and it would be senseless to operate paralleling roads. But to take up these roads would be one of the minor of the hardships of which I have spoken. In the second place there are only a minimum number of railroads in the country that pay any dividend at all, and still fewer that have paid dividends for any great length of time. Supposing, therefore, that the statute for acquiring the railways should enact that the Government should purchase any railroad whose company's stock has paid a dividend of four per cent per annum for five or six or twenty years: and that, as fast as any railroad company arrived at that point of consecutive prosperity, the Government should so purchase that railroad; would not one of two things be certain, viz : Either the Government would find itself the owner of a railroad compelled to compete with a railroad in private hands, or the private owners of every railroad in the United States could turn the tables on the General Government, so that instead of forcing the railways companies to sell to the government, the railways

could force the government to buy, by simply "doctoring" their dividends? In either case, what greater hardship can be imagined? The government, with limitless resources, competing with its own citizens with their modest capital. How long would it be before the citizens were ruined? But, great as it would be, what would the ruin of a handful of citizens amount to beside the ability of another handful of citizen to "cook" a lot of consecutive dividends and so force the general government to buy railroads as fast as they pleased. We clamor somewhat about Jay Gouldism as it is, when we have but the one Jay Gould. How many Jay Goulds and opportunities for him, would we make by passing the most reasonable of statutes permitting the government to obtain control of our railways? Even government cannot make laws fast enough to meet, let alone to anticipate, the inventive genius of this people in money getting; and to abolish the general railway laws of every state in the Union, would not take away from a single state its railway chartering power.

This is a free country, and legislation is quite as free as everything else. But the very exuberance of personal liberty may tend to its curtailment. We have seen the policy of free public schools develop into the policy of a compulsory education: general railway law into an Interstate Commerce Act. And a right to prohibit the drinking of beer may not be radically so very far removed from the right to compel the drinking of rum, or to enforce attendance at Church or Sunday School, or to support the theatres, or to ride on government railways. Stranger things have happened than that a people whose forefathers refused to drink tea because it was taxed, should be willing to send their telegrams only on government wires, or ship their products only on government wheels a century and a quarter later. Indeed, I think it will be found that the European governments, which control their railways, do not always stop there, but take other of their subject's necessities and conveniences (such as tobacco, etc.) under their paternal wing. And if we borrow the principle, we will all the more be apt to borrow its productions.

It is not pretended that, in the relations of the public to the

railways it has chartered, there are no frictions to be overcome, no inequalities to be adjusted: no wrongs to be righted in their correspondence with all those other great corporate interests, whether municipal or private, with which they must come in contact, so long as the general prosperity of the continent continues. The tendency of every well conceived and carefully nourished commercial and municipal interest is, and always will and must be to enlarge and magnify itself. The fisherman in the Arabian Nights unbottled a giant that he was quite aware of the impossibility of ever bottling again. But giants are apt to be good natured, and that fisherman, as I remember the legend, suffered no harm. The alarmist and the timid man is apt, no doubt, to associate size with a disposition to tyrannize; but, in nature, the rule works quite the other way. Size and spite are entirely incompatible in nature, and a little reflection will convince that they do not amalgamate in commercial matters. But, even if the railway is a giant which uses its giant's strength tyrannously, the remedy is not to amote, to stamp out, to suppress or "gobble" or confiscate the railway. If there is any private grief, it should be taken to the courts which are always open, (and, we may add, are none to kind to the giant railway)-and, as to the public interest, that must be taken to the forum where all public interests must ultimately go-to the calm, patriotic, earnest, peaceloving, and law-abiding convention of common sense and not to the clamor of the rabble or the mob of the Market Place. The remedy is not yet formulative, but in the future, and must be worked out concurrently with the working of the Institution sought to be remedied-from within that Institution, and not from without it; not by arraigning it against all the other institutions of Commerce and Trade which it was created to serve, and by whose prosperity it lives, but by amalgamating them with it and treating them as they are—as identical. The railway system had been a growth; the growth concurrently with and inseparable from, the growth of Commerce and Trade; the goodly share of the world's wealth it has created, has also created it. Compare the prosperity of any territory in the United States with the prosperity of the

egg

Railway System which forms its artery; and the question, which created which? is like the question debated in the Limekiln Club, as to whether the hen was the mother of the egg or the the mother of the hen. It is impossible to imagine the one except as both the cause and effect of the other. The growth of each synchronizes with that of the other. First the railway, then commerce, wealth, civilization: first commerce, wealth, civilization, then the railway; state the formula as you please. From the beginning of the railway, the railway interest and the interests of trade have been inseparable: each has been prostrated when the other was prostrated, buoyant when the other was buoyant, supreme when the other was supreme. And the railway system of this nation can no more be isolated from the commercial and financial interests than could the blood circulate in the arterial system of a human being whose heart has been plucked out, or that the heart could receive and propel blood through the arterial system of a dead man. But this does not prevent our erudite Mr. Hudson, for convenience of treatment, no doubt, from separating them separately and distinctly as follows: "The rights of the thousands of millions of railway property are important, but not more so than those of the ten of thousands of millions of private property and business capital that suffer for want of such legislation." (p. 316.)

Growing up, then, with the wealth and convenience of the nation, with, and out of its trade, its civilization and its commercial and financial necessities-it was impossible that friction, hardship and loss should not somewhere result in the operation of the railway interest as regards the people. It takes a long time for complex systems to adjust themselves to each other; and having the greater share of the complexities, the Railway was the proximate cause, no doubt, of the greater shares of these frictions, hardships and losses. Sometimes the railway has outrun the development of the territory; sometimes the development of its territory has outrun the railway; sometimes a railway has been unable to move its trains; sometimes it has stalled them for want of freights to move. But in neither case has the remedy, correction and adjustment been found by antagonizing the railway with.