railroad carriers engaged in interstate and foreign commerce." He advances many strong and interesting reasons to sustain his premise, and I wish that each of you would read his argument as made to the Joint Committee. At this time I will quote from an article by Hon. Charles W. Bunn, in Harvard Law Review of April, 1917: "In a country of an area so vast as the United States, with such variations of soil and climate, efficient transportation is a paramount necessity; transportation to satisfy both the needs of commerce and the requirements of preparedness for war and the public defense. The means of transportation have fallen behind the needs of commerce in peace and would more strikingly fail to fill the requirements of war. Railroad construction has come almost to a stop. "Whether this be caused in whole or in part by unwise regulation does not concern this inquiry. At least the opinion is widely held by students of the subject that any system of regulation of railways by many governments, by the nation and by each State acting in discord, is doomed to failure and is destructive of the railways. Their regulation by the national government to the greater exclusion of the States, and to that end their incorporation as national railways, is being considered by a joint committee of the two houses of Congress." In conclusion, I will briefly discuss the power of Congress to establish a centralized control over the carriers. Many years ago it was held in Monongahela Navigation Company v. United States, 148 U. S., 312 (1892), that Congress has the same power over railways which it has over navigable waters. That is equivalent to saying that its powers are unlimited, and, as was held in the case of Wisconsin v. City of Duluth, 96 U. S., 379, it is exclusive. The Minnesota Rate Cases establish the principle that Congress can control local rates in order to efficiently and completely regulate commerce among the States and with foreign nations, and we can reach from these authorities no intelligent conclusion other than that Congress in order to control interstate commerce may regulate and control transportation wholly within a State. I feel that State regulation is not needed, and is expensive and injurious, while unlimited centralized control will be beneficial both to the public and to the carriers. I will conclude this argument by again quoting from Mr. White: "And when we contemplate government ownership, we are irresistibly led to the conclusion that, if government regulation is a failure, government ownership will likewise prove fallacious, and, if government regulation can be made successful, then the reason for government ownership is elim inated." SHOULD GOVERNMENTAL CONTROL OF EXTENDED? PAPER BY C. E. DUNBAR, OF AUGUSTA. The good old word "Symposium" had once a jovial ring; one could almost catch the clink of touched glasses in it; but chautauquas and bar associations have dragged it from its high estate, and to-day it carries rather a mournful impression-not that even a symposium a la grecque in Georgia of to-day would exactly measure up to either the legal or the Broadway definition of “a riot." But the word has largely come to mean the putting together of thoughts, and sometimes, alas, of less than that. Yet, even in degenerating, it has seemed to keep, or acquire, the idea of brevity as one of its distinguishing and essential requirements. Therefore violence would be done by the writer to that trust which has carelessly permitted him to get the floor-or space in the annual proceedings-should this paper attempt to deal with all, or even more than one, of the classes of corporations that public opinion, which after all, when it becomes concrete and final, is law, considers or is rapidly coming to consider as quasi-public corporations— such corporations, to group them conveniently and fairly accurately by a Georgia classification, as all those other than such as can now be created by the Superior Courts of Georgia. To discuss the regulation of all such would lead us to consider: power companies, telegraph companies, electric light, gas and water furnishing concerns, insurance organiza tions of many kinds, etc., etc., and each separately—and we just can't do it; or at any rate the writer won't! Anyway, as to many of these, some of you gentlemen who are not on the program, or have no serious business at this year's meeting, can take a day off, and solve all their problems of regulation. During my membership in the General Assembly it was repeatedly done, and each time finally done, for each of them, in less than that. Certainly no one here would consider our cousins of the medical profession, masters of a mere art, as superiors to, or perhaps even the peers of, us, Priests and High Priests of the Science of Truth. Yet the doctors have one commendable trait: they usually attend the sickest patient first; though I, personally, have always considered necessity dictated that, and the vision of a practice perishing amid the just execrations of the else bereaved friends and kin. But we have sometimes been accused of putting off difficult matters as long as possible. Well, we have with us to-day a very ill patient, or, if you prefer, a very hard case to solve-that of the railroads, the real railroads, the great interstate arteries of our commercial life. And I am persuaded that unless something is done, and that speedily, for this chronic invalid, then death, or something for the public perhaps worse than death, government ownership, must come to this sufferer. But the remedy does not seem to lie in the direction of regulation, as we have been accustomed to use the term; not more regulation by the forty-eight State-and one Federal-railroad commissions; that is what ails the sick now, too many doctors of too many schools of thought. Nor have the courts, in their diverse, entangled, contradictory, and often puzzling interpretations on "interstate" and "intrastate" business, functions and transactions, anything to their credit in having helped the situation. Of what use, for instance-except to lawyers-is a decision that a shipment over a local and Texas concern (Galveston Terminal), is subject to the Interstate Commerce Act, that wharf railroad being a part of the Southern Pacific System (219 U. S. 498); when coupled with a decision by the same court that a shipment from South Dakota to Texarkana, Texas, is intrastate as to Texas, because there it was transferred on a separate bill of lading for further transportation to another place in Texas (204 U. S. 403)? Confusion worse confounded!-to the lay mind, at any rate. And the lay mind, sad to relate, is the one that, in this great republic of ours, digs up most of the money that is necessary, by way of investment, to make railroads and other industrial concerns "go"; and this lay mind is asking more and more insistently for some reasonable probability of returns on its money before letting it loose for railroad uses. I trust that no member will consider me as holding here a brief for the railroads-none that knows me will. It has been one of the few real pleasures of an otherwise rather serious life—my fights and cases against them. "The joy of battle" has never more exhilaratingly leaped through me than when it has been my good fortune to give them one of those castigations they so often so richly merit. I have never been in the employ of one of them, and hope never to be. For one reason, because the more zest and the more money lies on the other side; for another, because I have always felt that to me at least it would bring mental deterioration and impoverishment; it takes a stronger, more stable mind than mine, indeed such an one as is possessed by the majority, at any rate, of our brethren who represent them in Georgia, to stand up under the deadly monotony of the "trench warfare" imposed by their defenses. A few days ago the public prints carried the news from Washington that a member of the Senate had there stated his belief that the railroads themselves were behind a movement to bring about government ownership. It is true the senator was from a State which has not of recent years furnished overmuch sapience to the Senate, and that his remarks are reported to have caused a sensation in that body; but he may, in anticipation somewhat, have stumbled upon what might very soon be the truth; upon a condition that might be forced upon the railroads. Increased operating expenses and decreased or stationary earnings, cannot always continue companions, when, at the same time, interest on bond and stock issues must |