similar decisions is seen in the report of the New England Road of October 28, 1897, in which the railway managers say boldly that they are to-day levying three times as heavy transport taxes on their pooled, local business as on the through business over which their power is not yet absolute— business not yet pooled. The Commission has made itself an instrument for driving the people from their country homes to city dove-cotes; an instrument for the impoverishment and enslavement of the common people.

The reasoning from natural conditions adopted by the Commission, carried out to its logical conclusion, would banish the bicycle, enjoin the use of the motor carriage, destroy railways and tramways, abolish even our common highways and bridges and remand us back to the happy natural condition which prevailed throughout the Western Continent when the Spaniards landed in Mexico, and the only means of land transportation was by human burden bearer, and that burden bearer usually a woman.

I take direct issue with the Commission both as to the object of its existence and the object of the existence of the railroad. The business both of the one and of the other is to equalize commercial conditions, to secure to every community and to every individual within the limits of the United States the nearest possible equality of transportation service.

The Commission has done valuable work in many lines, but it is altogether mistaken in its theory as

to the determination of transport taxes and as to the real business of the railway. In this connection it is interesting to note that, while the Commission condemns the adoption of one wide zone of uniform rates and of equal commercial conditions for the whole people, it admits the principle of grouped rates and of equal commercial conditions within limits, determined by its peculiar methods of guesswork and comparison.

Behold its just system of rates on milk brought by railway to New York:

Group 1.-40 miles from terminal.

Can Milk (forty quarts), 23 cents.

(forty quarts), 41 cents.

Can Cream

Group 2. Next sixty miles (40 to 100 miles). Can Milk, 26 cents. Can Cream, 44 cents.

Group 3.-Next 90 miles (100 to 190 miles). Can Milk, 29 cents. Can cream, 47 cents.

Group 4.-190 miles to 417 miles or more. Can Milk, 32 cents. Can cream, 50 cents.

I fail to see anything affecting the cost of the service in a grouped rate of forty miles that will not hold good for any distance. What reason can there be for adding three cents for the sixty miles of group 2, and but three cents for the ninety miles of group 3, and again three cents more for the two hundred miles or so of group 4? And why charge more for cream than for milk? What business have

either the railway managers or the Commission to pry into the contents of the can ?

The Interstate Report of 1895 affords the following valuable information: On the 30th of June, 1895, there were 30,000 railroad trains in use on the Royal-Railed Highways of the United States. The average train represents in its own cost and its share of the cost of tracks, stations, etc., about $365,000, or the value of a year's labor of a thousand Massachusetts farmers. (See May number of Yale Review, 1897, page 64.) The cost of its daily operation, including its share in the maintenance of the tracks, etc., which exist for its use, is a little over sixty-six dollars a day, and to run it and keep its iron road in good condition, requires the constant service of twenty-six men. The total daily charge against the average train, including its share of the interest on the cost of the entire equipment is about $100 a day. The average freight train weighs hardly less than 400 tons, and the average passenger train hardly less than 160 tons, or one ton per passenger seat. Both trains are hauled by tireless iron horses easily capable of making 300 miles a day.

My fourth proposition, page 6, that the transport tax levied to meet the cost of the shortest distance in any particular class of railway service will meet the cost for any distance in that class of service, within a railway system-the long haul will very often cost less than the short haul-this proposition does not mean that five-cent fares, with but forty persons

or less occupying the 160 seats in the average $365,000 train throughout each zone of 25 miles. in a daily course of 100 miles, would meet the expenses chargeable to that train; neither does it mean that under any imaginable condition, every railroad train could be made to meet its expenses; it does mean that, with five-cent fares in ordinary railway service, the average train would require seats for at least 200 passengers whose average trips would probably be not over ten miles, and in that case, the average train would earn, from its five-cent uniform fares, $100 a day as against $80 a day from its average fare of about fifty cents. With daily runs of 300 miles-the New Britain third-rail electrics make 324 miles a day-the five-cent train would make average daily earnings of $300.

The cost of running the average passenger train on the Genesee & Wyoming Valley Railroad is about 95 cents a mile, but, with an average trainload of only 1 persons, the cost to the road per passenger mile is 673 cents, and for the whole length of the road-5 miles-the cost of the passenger trip is about $3.70. On the New Haven Road the cost per train mile is about 98 cents, but, with train-loads of about 75 passengers, the cost to the road, per passenger mile, is only about I cents. It actually costs the New Haven Road less to haul a passenger the whole length of its main line, New York to Boston, 232 miles, than it costs the Genesee & Wyoming Valley Railroad to haul a passenger over its line of but 5 miles. The

5-mile passenger trip on the Genesee road costs that road more than seven times as much as the cost of the 24.02 miles trip of the average railway passenger of the United States. A study of pages 404 to 473 of the Interstate Report of 1893 will disclose very many instances of this character.

In September, 1896, a uniform five-cent fare was adopted on the Blue Island Line of the Chicago & Northern Pacific Road. The Line is twenty miles in length. Under the old mileage plan it did not meet its expenses. A year later, with five-cent fares, the Line was making money.

There is more money in a five-cents uniform fare than in a three-cents-a-mile fare, says the Manager, S. R. Ainslie.

The receipts of grain at New York by canal, up to June 19, 1897, thirty-five days after the opening of the Erie Canal, were 4,000,000 bushels; by rail, 13,365,370 bushels. Whether this grain was carried by the railways at 1.8 mills per ton-mile, the reported and not disputed rate of the summer of 1895, does not appear, but at this rate, in trainloads of 1800 tons, the gross earnings per trainmile would be $3.24, or double the earnings of the average freight train of the country.—(R. R. Gazette, July 2, 1897). 1.8 mills per ton-mile is but 224 cents per ton, and less than $7 per car-load of 30 tons for the average haul of 1895, about 123 miles.

George R. Blanchard sums up his long argument on "Railway Pools" in this quotation from the