ship between the people and the corporation.' How does he distribute the duties and rewards of the "partners"? The people he burdens to supply what land the other member of the firm pays full value for; also to have itself and its separate estate transported by its partner; to exercise full control of the partnership property, and enjoy all profits above a "fair income on the capital." This arrangement relieves the other member of all duties, except to provide the capital in money and brains for construction and operation; to do all the work, take all the risks, meet all losses, pay all taxes to the popular side of the firm, and enjoy such "living" as its generous mate may consider "reasonable."

In such theory, is there not a dull confounding of property with its possessor? In a vague sense, all persons subject to common government are "partners," whether they be natural or artificial. persons. But their property is in no just sense partnership property, beyond the tax fraction which is needed to oil the wheels of State. Nor can the natural persons in the State be awarded a forced interest in the property of its artificial persons. Destroy self-control, and the personal interest of corporate investors is destroyed; repair and improvement are checked, stopped; dilapidation and uselessness follow. And if the people possess not even a partnership interest in the railway, how does "the railway belong to the people" wholly?

During forty years England has tried to subject railway transportation to the will of politicians, but has lately named the result as "nothing accomplished, nothing hindered," and the issue still vexes her "regulators." The late "granger" effort at the West proved only a spasm of folly, suspending prairie development and credit. Its statutes soon practically retired from activity, and no class profited less or suffered more by the movement than the producing guild that "travailed" with it. So precedent scarcely smiles in the face of present endeavor.

In seeking adjustment of this issue, there are certain foundation stones immovable and safe to build upon. To hold property is the natural right of every person. It is given with life. It is given with life. It is also second in our trinity of constitutional rights"life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It is not only a large factor in "liberty," but without this right, only the minimum "pursuit of

happiness" is practicable, and no "life" above slavery possible. Nor is the personal right to hold property one of limitations. It embraces the right to accumulate and to employ, with but a single check upon the will and ability of the holderthat he get and use property as not abusing any of the rights of others. There is, however, no natural obligation upon man to use his property for the benefit of his fellows, however far that way revealed duty may reach. Further, the right to employ property at will carries the right to combine it with that of consenting others. And here, the consent of all the people, through their agent, the State, to the right of way being granted, is reached the right to combine individual properties for the construction and operation of railways; and this without other than charter release of the right of control.

Hitherto this has been the general voice of the commercial world. And now, even those who ask to control others' earnings concede that this right of self-control belonged to primitive railways, poor and few, with rates inversely as their speed and conveniences. But to-day, when rail locomotion rivals lightning, and railways supply comforts and luxuries at half the price of old hardships; and since the generation which rode half-way through life in "prairie schooners" and "horrible stages," and hauled wheat one hundred miles to market with oxen, and bartered a bushel for forty cents in sugar and calico-since this generation has died, its wiser sons in palace cars find railway corporations" natural monopolies," their capital and income no longer the property of their shareholders, but of the State, and subject to a consuming legislative control. Thus does the fullness of excellence sometimes cloy appreciation. It is not strange large co-operative industry is always antagonized by those whose profits are curtailed by its success.

A single "co-operative institution" handles the merchandise of all Mormons in Utah, to their gain, and is accordingly cursed as a "monopoly❞ by all "Gentiles" seeking Utah trade. The vast co-operation stores in England-combinations of individual capital-find the multitude cheaply, but prevent large profits by small rivals, and, to the latter, they become "odious monopolies." If the combination of capital to promote one industry is morally right, its most magnificent achievement, the railway, cannot be wrong, even though it de

cline manipulation by the average legislator. Society, the State, or the nation is but a huge combination of capital in brains, money, and morals, whose success is conditioned upon wise self-control. And all wise management must come from within. Discreet men do not resign their business to adversely interested parties. And the rivulets of private fortune flow together in great enterprises only as they are left undammed by hostile legislation. The sole success of capital is in its independence of non-capitalists and its removal from politics. The merchant who should permit his clerks to name their salaries and the prices upon goods would be running across lots toward insolvency.

Having made the corporation its own master, what shall determine the cost of transportation to the patron? The same conditions which determine the cost to him of other services, or of wares. The truest and almost universal arbiter of prices is competition. This is a "governor" on all well-worked industries, from the milk-cart to the ocean steamship. As it droops, prices rise. Displace it, and there is danger of calamity. Demand and supply form the natural balance in commercial prices. If you say that among railways competition does not always compete, all lines of trade are subject to the same infirmity. Dealers in any given town usually make concert of prices upon their staple goods. And when, as not unfrequently occurs elsewhere, the Illinois roads, during the fall of '80 and much of the following winter, provided first-class passenger transportation for five hundred miles between Chicago and Kansas City for a single dollar, the most ultra anti-monopolist .temporarily smiled and conceded that competition was the natural adjuster of railway rates. And he has kept on smiling between Chicago and the ocean for five dollars all the past summer. Pooling does not always "pool."

Nevertheless, nothing else so adds to supply and reduces prices as do high prices. They are the seed of new effort, and, sooner or later, of real competition; for as rivals multiply, side-interests and impediments to pooling multiply. Had the early sewing-machine companies received but ten per cent. returns upon their capital, their family had not so rapidly increased, their work so soon approached perfection, and their prices universal ability to pay. Still, why should men reaping large profits from the operation of railways be

Yet

called "swindlers," while men reaping larger profits from the manufacture of sewing-machines are called "gentlemen'? Legislation has more fostered the machine than the railway, but has not mooted the regulation of its cost to patrons. its patrons at least equal those of the road. Νο class ever grew rich so fast as not to see "the dear people robbed" by the class that ran in its way of growing rich faster. So do boards of trade look upon railways. "Straining out gnats and swallowing camels" did not pass from earth with the Author of the rebuke; and his practical business parable, teaching man's right to do what he will with his own, has worn bright as the eighteen Christian centuries have worn dim.

No

Railway corporations are made of real men with souls, consciences, and generous sympathies, no less than are other business associations. other men so systematically tax themselves for the benefit of the clergy and the indigent. To sample their souls, it may be related that four great Chicago companies contributed each six hundred dollars per annum to the work of the Young Men's Christian Association in that city.

Judge Black and other writers against railway self-control unite to insist that transportation by water and transportation by rail are not to be subjected to like codes. Possibly; but if the public is to adjust the tolls for carriage over only one element, it should be that wherein no man has ever been allowed the right of private property, not that which is rendered traversable only by vast expenditure of private property. True, the sea and the railway are no more comparable than the sunbeam and the chandelier; one is God's, the other man's. What nature renders serviceable without taming by man is public domain, and its government, if governed at all, must from the public. But the control of what man makes belongs only to him who produces it. Nature opens the stream; private parties do not pay taxes upon it; if its bed or bank needs mending, the public is taxed for that; it is the property of the public. But private wealth opens the railway, pays taxes, upon it, keeps it in repair, and alone renders it valuable; it is the property of private persons, built for private revenue, public convenience being incidental. If a navigable stream fails, the loss is spread upon the public; but if a railway fails, the private stockholders bear only the direct loss, other people--the public

-feeling only a relative loss of convenience, which convenience is the public's full compensation for its charter privileges to the builders. And before any locality may fairly call itself wronged by a railway, it must prove its transportation conveniences less with than without a railway. By land and by water income justly flows back to the source of the invested capital; and the fair measure of income is what the public pays deliberately, and by the decade, rather than invest its own wealth in transportation. Comparatively, however, it is more reasonable that the public should schedule rates over the road-bed whose only cost it meets, than over the road-bed toward whose cost and equipment it contributes nothing but the fiction of a franchise.

Power is always accompanied by responsibility. This seems to be forgotten by the corporation of advocates that the State, having consented to be blessed with many railways, becomes thereby the practical owner of the investments, general manager of the improvements, and consumer of all profits above the " 'ordinary market income of capital." Such power would carry with it the responsibility of securing to the stockholders the "ordinary market income of capital," which in the past would often have subjected the State to great inconvenience. The father is entitled to the services, the income, of his minor son above his "running expenses"-food, clothing, and schooling-solely because he must meet those expenses, securing to the child an income in growth and improvement.

But State power, delegated to a handful of those men who make office their trade, is also dangerous -a tool liable to cut two ways. A commission (the plan thus far) in charge of rates has power to increase, as well as to reduce, thus possibly making its control onerous to the public and profitable to corporations. And precedent has hardly proved this class in power clean above possible corruption. The distinguished president of the National Anti-Monopoly League is positive that "the legislative and judiciary departments of government are corrupt and must be purified!" But if they are impure now, will they become better with greater power over private fortunes, alias temptation, put upon them? Once unleashed, this hybrid spirit of paternalism and communism may prove a hound upon the track of other industries than transportation. Already certain legislatures

debate the control of telegraphic tariffs. And if great services and great properties have their prices stamped by statute, precedent and analogy will soon subject all minor enterprises to this theory's bending-iron. Consistency would require that legislative manipulation of prices downward, once assumed, should work amazing revolution among certain industries. All our national life legislation has manipulated upward the prices of many manufactures by protective tariffs.

Manufactures have ridden the people with the bridle of monopoly and dictated legislation as defiantly as is possible to railways. Government has contributed infinitely more to the profit of manufactures than of railways. Then whose profit, if any, may it rightly toll? But, say the advocates of control (possibly), manufactures can't live without government aid-taxes upon the consuming people. But the profits of the rail are so large that transportation can divide with the people and still live. Very well; if it is the policy of popular government to insure to every guild a living income and pare all success down to that point, then truly did communism come in with the Constitution!

Only attempt to spread the principle of pricepaternalism over all industries which have had legislative permit to exist and to try for wealth, and this warfare will lose its delicate flavor for its soldiers.

If the theory that a railway charter is a contract is to be successfully traversed, leaving incorporators no rights which the State is bound to respect, then is that fickle faction called a legislature to terrorize over our largest private contributions to public prosperity. It may impair the charter at any moment; it may even cancel the charter upon firs completion of the road, totally defeating invest ments. Clothe the legislature with such power and the ambition of bad men to become member is stimulated, not quieted. Legislative control is simply the transfer of the railway's power to oppress to the legislature. If abuses must come, it is better that they be open than under cover of law. But it is true in the history of unrestricted railways, that they have steadily reduced their rates of transportation. While there is freedom, there is a subtle spirit of competition which thrives under the very eyebrows of the pooling system.

Is there a sort of chemistry of commerce whereby private property, invested in railway construction,

becomes public property? If so, who cares to cast his millions into the crucible? If railways are State assets, their shareholders are serfs whose fate follows their property, and they may be compelled to operate their transformed property at a losing rate, for the benefit of the public. The right to reduce profits by a cent is the right to take all profits and principal. Such is the despotism the logic of the regulators leads to. Yet one eminent attorney for the shippers grants that "the tolls ought to be high enough to give the corporation a fair profit on the capital they have actually invested."

But to control profits legislation must control more than tolls. Receipts do not figure on balancesheets much more conspicuously than do expenses. Legislation must appoint the quality and quantity of railway appurtenances, the number of trains, and the salaries of officers. Fancy the corporation committee of a legislature visiting the headquarters of some trunk line, summoning the president, superintendent, general freight agent, clerks, conductors, engineers, and the rest, then addressing them somewhat as follows:

"Gentlemen: By a fiction of law in a free country, which you of course cannot understand, this road is the property of the State;' and the legislature has concluded that it cannot afford to continue to you, as the agents of the State,' your late salaries. Henceforth, wages will be reduced all around from twenty-five to fifty per cent !"

Yet this is only the attorney's "fair-profit" theory before a field-glass. Apply this theory to the fourteen hundred railways of this country, and not epizootic and yellow fever in every city and hamlet could induce equal lamentation, non-intercourse, and financial stagnation.

To illustrate a former position more fully and familiarly, I note that the growth of grain is "clothed with a public interest." Still, the farmer, or farming section, that gets good crops in a generally bad year, enjoys something of a "monopoly" in grain, but is not thought unsound in morals or common sense to so use his advantage that the excess of demand over supply shall afford him the largest possible price. Yet to-day's aim is, in transportation, to overcome the natural law of demand and supply and adopt the arbitrary law of "clothed with a public interest" as apology for legislative regulation of rates, that the "monopo

listic" grain grower, or the grain-speculator, may augment his natural profit by reducing that of the grain-carrier. More inconsistent still is that zeal for regulation which skips the coal mine to fasten upon transportation. As a combination of capital, favored of legislation and "clothed with a public interest," the mine is not a whit behind the road. Yet law has never laid hand upon coal to approximate its cost to the producer or the middleman, and its price to the consumer. Its sales have no reference to a "fair profit on the capital invested." As a late large instance, throughout the West at least, stocks of coal laid down in the summer of '80 were sold during the following winter at two or three dollars per ton above what dealers reckoned their "fair profit" in the fall. And this is the right to be exercised unquestioned by all industries, save transportation. Merchants of every line and mechanics of every guild make demand and supply a basis for prices.

One of the anti-monopoly savants already quoted has it, first, that "the road belongs to the State;" second, "that the franchises are property in which the company has a vested right." Just how the State may own the road, and the company hold the only attributes which render ownership available, is a dim proposition to one not accustomed to reach the mysterious harmonies of the bar. If this germinal theory means anything, it is that, though the State owns the cow, the corporation has "a vested right" to milk her. If it is this toy ownership that is to delight the public, why, let them play with the

same.

But, again, Judge Black declares, "The amount of tax, toll, or freight, in any case, is not a subject of bargain between the shipper and the corporation, but a thing to be settled, fixed, and prescribed by public authority." That is a plain proposition in absolute despotism which no discreet man will vote to apply to his own industry; he will not put himself in the place of the company and approve it. He adds:

"The privilege of taking a certain fixed, prescribed, uniform, reasonable rate of toll from all persons alike, according to the use they make of the road, is a power that the State may bestow upon any person, natural or artificial."

This is true, but not the whole truth. The State may do much more. It has done much more. Almost uniformly it has bestowed the