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Show RAILWAY LEGISLATION. It is somewhat surprising that the various propositions offered in Congress for a supervision of railways should be based on the assumption that "the producing and chipping interests of the country are certainly compelled to pay the most unjust and exorbitant rates for transportation," when notorious facts conclusively refute the statement. If we are determined to deal with the railroads through Congress, we may as well deal fairly with them. If we must complain of their misconduct, we ought at the same time to admit their liberality and gratuitous concessions. There was a time when railroad charges for transportation were excessive-so high as to destroy the profits of shipping certain kinds of grain, and seriously impair the profits of shipping flour, even, by rail from the West to the seaboard; but the time is past. For the last ten years the tendency of railroad freight rates has been uniformly downward; the very combinations, at whose enormous power certain statesmen affect to shudder, have had but one result perceptible to producers and shippers-that of lowering the rates for carriage both of freight and passengers, increasing the speed and accuracy of running freight trains, and increasing the comforts and safety of passenger travel. It is not necessary to cite statistics and reports to prove this; the proof is all around us, in the enormously multiplied traffic, both passenger and freight, that seeks the railroads, and the harmonious and accurate adjustment of our whole business life to railroad habits and economy. The railways themselves are more anxious to reform the admitted irregularities and abuses in their management than the public can be, they recognize these abuses before the public does; they are incessantly taxing the best trained talent and intelligence in the country to effect further corrections; and it is an indisputable fact that the railroads themselves have done more to cheapen, reform and popularize railway carriage than all the legislatures and statesmen in the land. The railroad problem is multiplex and hard to grasp. Railroad men themselves admit this. Indeed the most intelligent of them confess they have not yet grasped, and cannot yet comprehend, a subject which is continually unfolding new aspects and now surprises. It is no wonder then that the legislative dealing with it is clumsy and blundering in the extreme, and that railway regulation laws have done more harm than good to the public. There have been three such laws enacted in Minnesota-one in 1871, another in 1871, both of which were confessed failures, and the one now existing; and it is admitted that the freight rates at present charged on railroads in that State are lower than those fixed by the law of 1871-a striking proof that the railroads are voluntarily doing as fast as they can the very thing which legislators are attempting to do without knowing how. Nearly all propositions for railway regulation are based on the pro rula theory-that carriage rate should be proportionate for long and short hauls. But what would become of western produce if this rule were inexorably enforced. A reasonable rate for carrying grain a distance of 200 miles from the interior of New York and Pennsylvania to a seaport would be, say 15 cents a bushel, but this rate applied to grain carried from Missouri and Iowa would be ?[90] cents a bushel, and to Kansas and Nebraska $1.12 a bushel-rates which would make the shipment of western grain to the Atlantic and to Europe impossible. But what laws cannot do, the railroads themselves accomplish voluntarily by carrying western grain at cheaper proportionate rates than they charge for grain having only short distances to go. This is a glaring violation of the pro rula principle, it is true, but who can estimate its benefits to western producers and shippers? The railroad rates on grain from St. Louis to New York today (December 22d), are only 23 cents a bushel, and on flour 81 cents a barrel, whereas by any pro rula schedule based on short distances, they would be at least double those figures. Again, the distance from Philadelphia to New York is one hundred miles, and yet the freight rates on grain from St. Louis to New York is only one cent a bushel greater than the rate from St. Louis to Philadelphia. Does any one suppose that the roads could put grain on the cars at one city and carry it to the other at as low a rate as one cent a bushel. These facts illustrate how difficult it is for fixed laws to deal with the practical considerations in railroad management-the difference in cost between short hauls and long ones, the difference between half a car load and a full load, and the difference between carrying certain kinds of bulky western produce at very low rates and not carrying it at all-questions which in the very nature of things it is impossible for the inflexible law to rationally decide-[St. Louis Republican. |