PREFACE. THE animosity towards the Railway Interest, shown in a volume, "THE RAILWAYs and the RepuBLIC," by Mr. James F. Hudson, has been so largely prevalent among our people; so many honest and worthy persons have conscientiously shared in it, that it has seemed to me that a conscientious attempt to allay it would not be looked upon either as surplusage or as mere assumption. If I have, therefore, in the following pages, personified this animosity as "Mr. Hudson," it has been purely for my own convenience, not in the least because I think his book either important or dangerous on the whole. In rejoining to Mr. Hudson's book, not the least of the labor has been the reduction of his rambling and riotous charges, statements and conclusions to some sort of classification as to their subject-matter, and so to avoid the necessity of an equally ponderous volume of six hundred pages. I have tried to point out that the viciousness of the Interstate Commerce Law lay, not so much in the changes it might or could affect in the present railway conveniences of this people (indeed, except that it has somewhat built up the Canadian Pacific Railway at the expense of our own railroads, I am unaware that it has affected any change whatever, anywhere, up to the present time), as in the risk of putting upon our national statute books a law under which wicked, artful or ignorant men might throw the transportation business of this continent, and so the continent itself, into chaos inside of twenty-four hours. Portions of this work having previously appeared in The Popular Science Monthly, The Railway Review, The North Western Railroader and Science, I am indebted to the proprietors of those publications for permission to use them here. NEW YORK, July 1st, 1888. A. M |