Francisco, certainly it is very apparent that the railroads which have pooled to Salt Lake City or Denver must take a new factor into the account, for San Francisco has a most excellent water communication with the entire world, and is perfectly independent of railways, monopolies or otherwise. In other words, it is Nature and not railroad corporations that have discriminated against Denver and Salt Lake City, and in favor of San Francisco, by making it a commercial fact that (since water is cheaper than land transportation) San Francisco is actually nearer New York than Denver or Salt Lake City. The fact is that-so long as railway rates are regulated by geography-however distorted they may appear to the non-expert, the substitution of arbitrary for geographical rules in framing a tariff would result in rendering them still more distorted and uneven. And if the railways, pooled or unpooled, charge proportionately less rates to San Francisco than to Denver or Altoona or Salt Lake City, the higher power that has ordered it is the irresistible power of Nature. To what lengths of invective aud diatribe Mr. Hudson and his kind would proceed, did Nature and geography "pool" with the railways, it is amusing to speculate; but the fact-which oppresses the railway company at present, and imposes upon it the necessity of accommodating its rates to Nature (since Nature will not accommodate herself to the railways)-is that no pool can be made with the ocean, which charges nothing to the sons of men who plow its bosom with their, ships, and which is at no expense to keep itself in repair. For, let it be always remembered, in discussing these and like questions, a railroad is not, per se, a means of transportation. Such a definition is very far from being definitive by exclusion, as a definition ought to be. A railroad is a prepared and exclusive highway for traffic by means of the motive power of the locomotive engine, and is available only where locomotives can be used. There are still the foot-path, the bridle-path, the wagon-road, the ocean, the river, the canal, with which it must compete. There is still the inclined plane, with which (for the down-grade, certainly) no locomotive even can compete. And so, even were railway companies, the terrible affairs, the grasping

monopolies, the enemies of the human race, which Mr. Hudson asserts them, they are only so because the human race uses them, if it uses them at all, in preference to other means of transportation. Should Mr. Hudson induce his clientèle to discontinue their preference, the fact might be different; but in order to accept Mr. Hudson's conclusion (which, be it remarked again, is not the rule of the Interstate Commerce Law) that railways are public enemies because their tariffs sometimes are greater for the short than the long haul, we must primarily assume the two propositions: first, that the public are not at liberty to use any other means of transportation than the railways; and, second, that there is no such thing as competition. Does Mr. Hudson desire us to accept these propositions, or think that he has established them? What else does he mean by such a paragraph as this (page 40): "While the force of competition causes the railways to accept moderate or even narrow profits on the Western grain-traffic, the absence of that force allows them to collect what, by comparison, are shown to be exorbitant profits on the grain shipped by the farmers of the Eastern or Middle States." As a matter of fact, the figures actually show that it is combination, not competition, which has reduced the rates charged by the enemies of the republic and forced them to "accept moderate or even narrow profits." Surely, Mr. Hudson does not wish us to believe him guilty of catering to the general public by misstatements of fact in cases with which, from the least apparent foothold for grievance, he assumes such fluent familiarity. And yet, what else can we conclude from his retort to Mr. Fink's calm statement before the Senate Committee on Railroads in 1883, to the general effect above stated (viz., that geographical and not arbitrary conditions controlled pool-rates) in which he happens to mention Winona (using that town, as we have used Denver or Salt Lake City above, as an instance of a "short-haul " point)? "Why," says Mr. Hudson (page 161), "the road, if built for Winona, should have stopped at that place and given its exclusive attention to the transportation interests of that town." And, if this could be exceeded in artless incapacity, he

meets Mr. Alexander's statement (page 162), that "no railway has ever raised its local charges to meet the loss caused by lowering its through rates," by the following: "When railway rates have been reduced fifty per cent on through traffic within the last ten years, and local rates have virtually remained unchanged, the burden of the local shippers has been practically doubled, no matter what sophistry is used to conceal the fact." Surely, it needs no expert in railway affairs to detect that the "sophistry just here is not Mr. Alexander's. Lawyers of a certain grade sometimes talk to juries in this vein, but they are shrewd enough to know their jury pretty well before attempting it. An industry that employs seven or eight thousand millions of capital in these United States ought, one would say, to be reasonably suspected of employing brains here and there-certainly ought not rashly to be assumed to neglect the entire remainder of its continental field (to say nothing of the keeping of its own books), in order to concentrate its entire energies upon the commercial destruction of a single village! There has yet to be discovered, I suppose, a human institution in whose workings there was not hardship or inequality somewhere. But Mr. Hudson has only, it seems to him, to select his hardship to demolish the entire railway system-his principle being, not the greatest good to the greatest number, but the least good to the greatest number (or, possibly, the greatest good to the least number), so that the selected village is favored. But what else would this be, again, but a monopoly of commercial privileges; and how soon-did the railway or the railways adopt Mr. Hudson's suggestion and discriminate exclusively in favor of his village-before Mr. Hudson would be on his feet again with an entirely new compilation of grievances, demanding to know why this particular village was selected out of the entire continent to be so pre-eminently favored? Does not even Mr. Hudson begin to catch a glimpse of just how vast, how complicated, and inexhaustible this railway problem really is? But possibly he does not, for he says, You charge this village of B too much. No, we charge everybody according to geographical position; it saves us labor to do so, says Mr. Alex

ander. Well, anyhow, says Mr. Hudson, you lowered the rate to A, and did not lower the rate to B, and that's the act of a public enemy; and he straightway sits down and inflicts us with a book of 500 pages, of which the argument is (or ought to be, to be consistent) that A is not the public or even the republic, whereas B is both the one and the other. If Mr. Hudson will kindly turn to one of his own pages (in which possibly the mass of excerpta has bewildered him), he will be doubtless surprised to find (page 159) an admission that, astounding as it may seem, on a single trunkline in a single year, as between the anti-pool rates of 1865 and the pool rates of 1882, a saving to the public, in freights alone, of $318,947,486,261 has been effected. But, having made the admission, he is ready to meet it after his kind. "This is an astonishing instance," he continues, "of giving away what the giver never owned or possessed; the fact is kept out of sight that the business of 1882 is the result of the progressive reduction of rates for many years, and could never have existed but for the reductions." Surely, the shades of Adam Smith and Ricardo have never witnessed quite such a wiping out of the laws of supply and demand as this! Mr. Hudson will have us believe that the people of the United States on the line of the given railroad would not have eaten and drunk, or purchased supplies, worn clothes or slept on beds, and that population itself for seventeen years would have suspended its rules-perhaps the laws of gravitation themselves have ceased-had not this railroad reduced its rates. But let us overlook any possible increase of population or of the wants or luxuries of a given territory in the space of twenty-two years, and consider this particular railway company as all railways. The argument will then remain as follows: Railways are public enemies because they are exorbitant in their charges. But figures show that their charges are constantly decreasing. Never mind. that, says Mr. Hudson, if railways reduce their rates they only do so from the selfish motive of getting still more business. Most shippers over a railway would be contented if the railway would only charge them low rates. But Mr. Hudson (who, possibly, is not a shipper over any line) will have none of their reduced rates

unless they reduce them from the proper motive. After all, the act is nothing. It is the motive which must govern. And doubtless we could nowhere elicit a more virtuous, certainly nowhere a better specimen than this of Mr. Hudson's public-spirited argument against railroads, from this most exhaustive and most entertaining of scrap-books. "No matter what you do, if your 'eart is only true," says the old song. And so says Mr. Hudson to the railroads of this republic. But let it at least be remembered in their behalf that, even if they did it with selfish motives, the railways were themselves the first to attempt their own reformation. Railroads are and must remain built for the private emolument of their owners, and not for charitable purposes. They were not proof against the temptation of charging more money for a short haul to non-competitive points than for a long haul to competitive points in the struggle to live alongside of paralleling lines which the people themselves have chartered. But, when the pool removed this temptation by making all points non-competitivealthough no law, human or divine, compelled them; they did voluntarily resist the temptation to pool at maximum rates-the rates not only fell, but became proportionate to cost of hauling, the competition remaining only as to those "long-haul" points in whose favor Nature has discriminated by establishing water communications. Mr. Hudson has, perhaps, read a great many books. He should not have omitted from among them the late Dr. Lieber's "Civil Liberty and Self-Government" (especially the chapter wherein is treated the principle of the "Freedom of Rivers.") Then, remembering that the United States has not only two ocean coastlines, but great lakes and a system of navigable rivers more magnificent and more benign than that of any other country, he might possibly have perceived how-in his railway problem-so slight a consideration as our national geography might be at least as important a factor as a handful of selected individual hardships. Mr. Hudson does not relish the rates charged by our railway companies. He suggests no others, but is entirely clear, none the less, that they should be changed somehow. If rates are at present arranged upon a system, let us drop the system and make them