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Show THE PRESIDENT AND TOE RAILROADS. The statement given out last week by President Roosevelt as to his attitude toward railroads ought to be satisfactory to the roads and to the country. He believes that some railroads are overcapital ized, and wants that investigated. He wants such restriction over railroads as will compel them to be common carriers, which is right That is what railroads rail-roads were intended from the first to be. He especially declared that he had no idea of . Government ownership of railroads. He did not believe be-lieve in it, and that he. had no idea of putting machinery ma-chinery to work to cause them to reduce their rates. ' All that ought to be a matter between the roads and public interest, and the best interest of the roads. It is a fact that railroads long ago discovered that the lowest rates which afforded a profit gave them, in the long run, the greatest' profit. A great many men would not ride if rates were 4 cents a mile. A great many more would ride if fares were 2 cents a mile. Still a greater number would travel if the fares were 1 cent a mile. The point to estimate from is whether the 1, 2 or 4 cent will give them the most profit In the East they have generally settled on 2 cents a mile. Fares ought to be greater in this mountainous mountain-ous country than in the East for two reasons'. First, the grades are abrupt; it takes 'more power; it takes wore to keep the roads in repair. And second, there are not nearly so many people to ride. - The most marvelous thing to us that we ever saw in the West is that men pay 16 cents a mile, cheerfully, cheer-fully, in a mud wagon that makes five miles an hour, the original cost of which, compared with the rail-. rail-. road, was but trifling. f Put these same men in a palace pal-ace car with all the comforts and charge them 4 cents a mile, and carry them on an average of thirty miles an hour, and they howl from start to finish jover the exactions of the railroad. As we look at it the most of the trouble that is besetting railroads at present did not come from the novernment at all, but.it came from unreasonable and dishonest newspapers and demagogues, who are .seeking to array the poor against the rich, or who would convince the great crowd of the poor that a man with "a large amount of money, or a company with a grrat Railroad supplies prima facie evidence lliat hotli the money and the railroads were acquired l;y stv.-tling. ' So far as th President's last statement goes, all he asks is a square deal. That is all that any honest man wants, but the men gnd the talkers who are trying try-ing to array the country against corporate capital are-really are-really the enemies of both the rich and the poor. They are only .feeding the natural instincts of the depraved, de-praved, and they are doing it either for money or for office. In this connection the matter of overcapitaliza-.tion overcapitaliza-.tion of railroads is an important one, because the public pays the fares and the freights; they pay the interest on the capitalization. If it is too high, then '! they have to pay too much, and an investigation would be a good thing for the whole country to read, because Mr. Harriman, for instance, takes the ground that hn immense capitalization is not too great; that it has not. advanced any faster than other property has advanced; that railroad property ought to be worth its full value in any country, andihen there is another feature to it. The fact of the immense traffic imposes new obligaitons on the railroad com-panics. com-panics. Oar own belief is that they will either have to double track most of their main lines in the next few years or they will have to substitute roadbeds of rock and cement for the roadbeds of earth. That ' they, will have to put their railroad beds in the condition con-dition that they are in, say, England. A few years ago it was stated that roads in America had cost on an averagp $42,000 per mile, while the roads in England Eng-land had cost nearly double that amount. It was explained ex-plained that the difference came mostly in the cost of right of way, but the truth is that the chief cost abroad came from the fact that the English have always al-ways held that their roadbeds must be so solid that there would be no justification for their settling and t wisting their tracks out of place. When the road-l)t'dsar road-l)t'dsar made as they are across the sea they will ' have cost so much money that there will be no more talk about overcapitalization. |