Yet these are but the smaller troubles which await him. Take the question of the so-called “full-crew” law: Beginning only a very few years ago a wave of legislation swept over the country, compelling the railroads to increase the number of brakemen that they carried upon each of their trains. The carriers protested bitterly against the measure. They said that it was arbitrary, expensive, illogical, unnecessary. But it was indorsed by the labor organizations, and the politicians fell in line. Twenty-two states passed the law. Governors Foss of Massachusetts, Cruce of Oklahoma, and Harmon of Ohio vetoed it. So did Governor Hughes of New York. Later Governor Sulzer of New York signed it. It also became operative in Ohio. The people of Missouri, speaking through their referendum, threw it out. But in twenty states it became and remains statute—a greatly increased operating charge against the railroads which operate through them. The “full-crew” law in Pennsylvania, in New York, and in New Jersey costs the Pennsylvania Railroad an extra $850,000 a year—five per cent, if you please, on $17,000,000 worth of capital.
The “full-crew” legislation has been followed more recently by an attempt at legislation regulating the length of trains—freight trains in particular. Some of the men who engineered the first crusade have been responsible for the second. They have volunteered the suggestion that the railroads have sought to offset the effects of the “extra crew” by lengthening the trains. And they have countered by proposing statutes suggesting that all freight trains be limited to fifty cars, about half of the present maximum.
To the average man this will seem as logical as if the state were to step in and tell him how long he must take to reach his office in the morning or how long he must wear a single pair of shoes. To the railroader the injustice of the thing comes home even more sharply. For these ten years or more he has been working to increase the efficiency of his plant. He has believed that one of the straightest paths to this end has been in increasing the capacity of his trains—just as the carrying capacity of merchant ships has steadily been increased. He has made this possible by enlarging his locomotives and his cars, by laying heavier rails, by rebuilding his bridges and by ironing out the curves and reducing the grades in his tracks, by multiplying the capacity of his yards and terminals—all at great cost. These things have made the 100-car, 5,000-ton capacity freight train not merely a possibility, but to his mind an economic necessity as well. And this despite the interesting opinion of Mr. Harrington Emerson which I have given in an earlier chapter.
Last winter, when the state of Illinois seriously considered the legislation limiting train-lengths, the president of one of its greatest railroads went down into the southern part of the state and said:
“Do you wish us to discard these strong new locomotives that we have been building? Do you wish us to return to the small engines of a quarter of a century ago? It would be inefficient, wasteful to use our modern locomotives for the short-length trains. And sooner or later you would have to bear the cost of the discarded equipment. State laws may be erratic. Economic laws never are. They are as fixed as the laws of nature or of science.”
And the state of Illinois took heed of what this man and his fellows said and killed the piece of ridiculous legislation. But it is by no means killed in some of the other states of the Union.
The conflicts between state authorities that we noticed already have borne directly upon the railroad’s earnings. The conflicting intrastate rates have borne far more deeply and far more dangerously upon them. Indiana long since fixed the demurrage penalty at one dollar a day for each car which a railroad failed to furnish a shipper; North Dakota made it two dollars; while Kansas and North Carolina fixed it at five dollars a day. Unscientific is hardly the word for such rate-making. And how shall one term Kansas’ action, withholding passenger-fare legislation until she found whether or not the supreme court of Nebraska would permit the two-cent-a-mile bill of that state to stand?
If these rank discrepancies in the manhandling of rates by the various states affected only their own territories it would be quite bad enough. Unfortunately they play sad and constant havoc with the interstate rates.[19] These are delicate and builded, many times, upon local or state conditions. And this despite the fact that the vast majority of freight traffic is interstate, rather than intrastate. The majority of the grain from the farm lands of Nebraska or Minnesota is not destined for Omaha in the one case, or Minneapolis in the other; yet these sovereign states take upon their solemn shoulders the regulating of grain rates—to the ultimate discomfiture and cost of the other portions of the land.
I have but to refer you to Justice Hughes’s decision in the so-called Minnesota rate case. He showed how this arbitrary local outgrowth of the obsolete doctrine of states’ rights worked to the utter and absolute detriment of the nation as a whole. And yet in the six long years while that case was pending the Great Northern and Northern Pacific companies lost more than $3,000,000—a sum of money never to be recovered from their shippers—as a result of the state’s unsustained reductions in freight rates.[20] No better argument has ever been framed for the nationalization of our railroads, for making the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission absolute and supreme.