[390]. See Ind. Com. vols. iv and ix, and Hudson, Hadley, etc.
[391]. They tend to stability, economy, and efficiency, diminishing the fluctuation of rates, railroad wars, and the wastes of competition, and improving the service by better co-ordination, distribution of traffic, etc.
[392]. See the powerful statements of President Ingalls, President Fish, Paul Morton, Professor Seligman, Commissioner Prouty, etc., Ind. Com. vol. iv; and statements of Professor Ripley, Morawetz, Fordyce, etc., Sen. Com. 1905. It is absurd to forbid co-operation for the maintenance of reasonable rates and prevention of superfluous transportation, or any other honest purpose. Traffic agreements may secure a co-ordination of service approaching that which would be attained by unity of management. The fetish-worship of competition is one of the prime curses of our economic ignorance. We might as well worship destruction, injustice, and inefficiency. Moreover, competition of the kind that protects the public from oppressive rates cannot be maintained in the railway world. Let the railways unite, and then control them, insisting on the dominance of the public interest so far as necessary to accomplish justice.
[393]. The United States Supreme Court held in the Trans-Missouri Case, March 22, 1897, and the Joint Traffic Association Case, Oct. 24, 1898, that railroads cannot lawfully agree on rates to competitive points. But no law or decision can well prevent railroad managers from meeting and coming to an understanding that they will adopt the same rates to such points. No contract in restraint of trade or to limit competition is necessary,—if each railroad publishes the same rates between “competitive” points and maintains them, competition as to rates is killed as effectually as if there were a pool or a traffic association with a written agreement.
[394]. Sen. Com. 1905, pp. 2923, 3338.
[395]. Sen. Com. 1905, p. 3482.
[396]. Ibid., pp. 3485, 3486. The railroad managers decided to notify offending railroads that unless rates were restored, the lowest cut rates that had been made by any line would be adopted by all, to punish the rebaters and stop them from getting business thereby. At a meeting July 26, 1882, 30 railroads being represented, a resolution was unanimously adopted, directing agents at connecting points to examine waybills, and when rates were found to have been cut, to hold the freight at the expense of the initial line until the waybills had been corrected.
[397]. Sen. Com. 1905, p. 1908, and index, “Rate-Making.”
[398]. The Senate is too full of men interested in railroads in one way or another to make it easy to pass any measure that might seriously affect either the power or the profits of the roads.
[399]. President Tuttle agrees with the Commission on this point. In his testimony to the Senate Committee, 1905, he said that the company’s books would not show rebates, etc., “unless they wanted them to. I will say to you frankly that if a company intended to evade the law by giving rebates and commissions they would find some way of so covering them up that all the experts on the face of the earth could not find them. If you assume at the beginning that the railroad management is deliberately going into violations of the law it is not going to make records of those things which can ever be found out.” (Sen. Com. 1905, p. 952.) But President Tuttle said: “There is ample opportunity to ascertain if rebates exist. There are always opportunities. The competitive shipper knows about it. There is always enough of the loose end hanging out somewhere so that if the Interstate Commerce Commission or whoever is authorized to move in those matters will take the time to proceed upon the lines of information that they can always get they will be easily ferreted out and punished. I do not think there is any evidence that the Interstate Commerce Commission has tried to enforce the Elkins Law.” (Same, p. 951.) Shippers have, however, often stated that they felt sure some concession was being made to their rivals, but they could not tell what, and in many cases there is simply a vague suspicion; no one knows whether others are paying the tariff rates or not. And railroad men have admitted, as in the B. & A. case, that no shipper knew what rates others were getting.