tariffs levied on the borders of their respective kingdoms remained subject to such terms of peace or war as the different potentates might agree upon.

The fourth section of the Act, the long and short haul section, made distance the prime factor in the determination of rates at non-competitive points, and allowed it to be altogether disregarded between places not similarly situated.

The Commission has decided that, under this section, it is lawful for railway managers to carry products for persons living at great terminals for one-half the rates levied upon those living at intermediate stations. Thus, in the noted Readville case, the railways were allowed to charge eighteen cents a hundred pounds on flour from New York to Readville, while the tax from New York to Boston, eight miles further on, was but nine cents. Boston and other terminals, favored by nature with their location on the ocean, the lakes, and on navigable rivers, are thus, by law, given this further artificial advantage of receiving their supplies and sending off their products at half the rates levied. upon the intervening country. The result is to leave the country between terminals almost as badly off, so far as the cost of movement is concerned, as before the railways were built. The local rates levied by the railways in these cases are, indeed, only just enough below the actual cost of conveyance on foot or on horseback, by wagon or by oxcart, to keep the people from reverting to these original methods of transportation.

Distance, as I have said before, measures very accurately the cost of the old forms of private conveyance, and, by using distance for the determination of local rates, railway managers are very successful in keeping the districts between terminals in the same condition in which the railways found them.

In many cases these intervening districts are, in fact, worse off than they were in the olden time, for they ran in debt to build the railroads only to see their local enterprises and their brightest men driven away by railway discriminations in favor of the terminals.

But the height of absurdity in this business was reached when the majority of the Supreme Court of the United States decided that it was lawful for American railway managers to charge three or four times as much for the transportation of goods from American workshops to their American customers as was charged for the transportation of similar goods from Europe to the same customers.' This decision not only tends to nullify our customs legislation; it almost compels the American manufacturer, who would continue to supply the American market, to move his plant to Europe or Asia.

Evidently it would be a great step in advance to so amend the Interstate Act that the tax for the shortest haul, the tax representing the cost of the average service, should be the uniform, standard tax for all hauls.

1 See Texas and Pacific case.

Finally, the Interstate Act forbids pooling. Instead of looking at the railroads as the great circulating system of the country, each line existing for the development of its particular territory, and all working together for the harmonious growth of the whole, the Interstate Act regards each road as somehow the competitor of every other. The idea seems to me as ridiculous as it would be to regard the arteries and veins of the human body as competitors; the arteries as competitors of the veins, and each artery and vein as the competitor of every other. It is no wonder that Mr. Depew styles this giant piece of legislation a mere skeleton.

Yet it is something to have a skeleton, for we may clothe it with flesh and blood and breathe into it the breath of life.

The solution of the railroad problem involves both our industrial and our political liberties. It is as essential to our common welfare to-day that the regulation of railroad tariffs should be taken from our various railroad governments, and that the revenues therefrom should be pooled under the direction of the general Government, as it was to the common welfare of our ancestors, in 1789, that the regulation of the customs tariff should be taken from the different States, and that the revenue arising therefrom should be taken under the control of the same central power.

We are no longer a mere confederation of independent States or of independent railroad provinces, but a great nation of individuals, indissolubly

bound together, and the strongest ties that unite us are those of friendly and of commercial intercourse; that intercourse, moreover, is almost entirely dependent upon the railways which, from their birth, have been our great post-roads and, as such, have always been subject to the eighth section of the first article of our national Constitution. For many years the Post-office has handled the commerce in paper-covered books, both within states and across state boundaries. If it is within the limits of the Constitution for the Postal Department to undertake this branch of transportation, then it is equally constitutional to extend the sphere of the Post-office to cover the entire business of public transportation.

The Interstate Act requires a new baptism and a new name, and the new Act may well be called 66 An Act for the Establishment of a National and an International Freight and Passenger Post."

This scheme does not necessitate the immediate ownership of the railways by the Government; it is not absolutely essential for its success that the Government should own one dollar's worth of railway property. Its adoption, however, will make it very desirable that the Government should own the car-equipment of the country, and it is probable that the bonds issued for this purpose could be paid for in a very brief period out of the ordinary revenues; this, too, after paying the railroads most handsomely for the haulage of the cars and for other services.

The 7,937 (in round numbers 8ooo) postal, baggage, and express cars in the United States could be paid for in two or three years, even in one year, out of the annual taxes now levied upon the people for the transportation of the mails and of express matter, and this after allowing the railroads a very liberal amount for the haulage of these cars. This equipment is certainly not worth over $2500 per car (the baggage and express cars of New York State are only valued at $1500 per car), and, at this rate, the 8000 cars would come to. $20,000,000

The interest on this amount, at 3

per cent, is..... Allowing $720 a year for the care and repair of the average car (the amount estimated by Mr. Vilas for postal cars, in his report of 1887), we have....

The Fitchburg Railroad of Massachu

setts furnishes its milk contractors with cars, heated in winter, for $5730 per car per year.

The Boston and Maine Road taxes its milk contractors but $3000 per year per car.

The cost of hauling a freight car on

the Soo Railroad, in 1895, was but one cent a mile, at which rate the cost of hauling one of these cars on a passenger train, 300 miles a

700,000

5,760,000