| Show RAILROADS AND PROGRESS in his testimony before the senate committee on interstate commerce at washington on may 4 prof hugo R meyer of the chicago university an expert on railroad management made this statement let us look at what might have happened tapp ened if we had heeded the pro tests of the farmers of new york and ohio and pennsylvania in the 70 s when grain from the west began pour ing to the atlantic seaboard and acted upon the doctrine which the in ter state commerce commission has enunciated time and again that no man may be deprived of the ad vantages accruing to him by virtue i bis geographical position we could not have west of the mississippi a population of millions of people who prosperous and are great con sumers we never should have seen the years when we built 10 and 12 miles of railway tor there would have been no farmers west of the mississippi river who could have used the land that would have been opened up by the building of those railways and if we had not seen the years when we could build 10 and 12 miles of railway a year we not have today east of the mississippi a steel and iron prodoc ing center which Is at once the rel and the despair of europe because we could not have built up a steel and iron industry it there had been no market for its product we could not have in new england a great boot and shoe industry we could not have in new england a great cotton milling industry we could not have spread throughout new york and pennsylvania and ohio man industries of the most dl versified kinds because those indus tries would have no market among the farmers west of the mississippi river and while the progress of this country while the development of the agricultural of this country ald mean the impairment of the ag ri cultural value east of the mississippi river that ran up into hundreds of millions of dollars it meant incident ally the building up of great manu fracturing fac turing industries that added to the value of this land by thousands of millions of dollars and gentlemen those things were not foreseen in the 70 s the statesmen and the public men of this country did not see what part the agricultural development of the west was going to play in the in du development of the east and you may read the decisions ot the interstate commerce commission from the first to the last and what is one of the greatest characteristics of those decisions the continued inability to see the question in this large way the interstate commerce commis alon never can see anything more than that the farm land of some farm r Is decreasing in value or that some man who has a flour mill with a pro of fifty barrels a day Is being crowded out it never can see that the destruction or impairment ot arm values in this place means the building up of farm values in that place and that that shit ting of values Is a necessary incident to the indus trial and manufacturing development of this country and if we shall give to the interstate commerce cominis slon power to regulate rates we shall no longer have our rates regulated on the statesmanlike basis on which they have been regulated in the past by the railway men who really have been great statesmen who really have been great builders of empires who have had an imagination that rivals the imagination of the greatest poet and of the greatest glea test inventor and who have operated with a courage and dar ing that rivals the courage and dar ing of the greatest military general but we shall have our rates regulated by a body of civil servants bureau brats whose besetting sin the world over is that they never can grasp a situation in a large way and with the grasp of the statesman that they never can see the tact that they are confronted with a small evil that that evil Is relatively small and that it cannot be corrected except by the creation of evils and abuses which are infinitely greater ahan the one that Is to be corrected |
