The special counsel recommended that “the Atchison Company and all its principal officers and agents who had, during the period above named or any part thereof, power and authority over traffic agreements and freight rates, be arraigned for contempt of court.”
President Roosevelt has directed that proceedings for contempt be taken against the companies in the Colorado Fuel Case and the International Harvester Case, but will not proceed against individual officers personally in any case until the department is in possession of “legal evidence of wilful and deliberate violation” of law on their part.
I went over the Santa Fe while these secret discriminations were in full blast, and met President E. P. Ripley, Vice-President Paul Morton, and other high officials, who impressed me so favorably in our talks about rates, discriminations, etc., that I wrote in my notebook: “I believe I have found one honest railroad in America, honest at least in intent, whatever deviations from principle the system may force upon it.” Mr. Spearman evidently got a similar impression, for he says: “The Santa Fe has eliminated preferential rates entirely from its own traffic problems; and this sturdy determination to put all shippers on a just and equal footing, to maintain open and even rates, is the keynote of President Ripley’s successful strategy.”[[194]]
This is stronger than the impression I received, which was that discriminations did exist and it was not thought possible that they should cease to exist, so long as competition continues, but that there was an earnest purpose to eliminate them so far as possible. Notwithstanding the Colorado Case and others mentioned hereafter I still think that the present administration of the Santa Fe is on the whole relatively very honest and very admirable.[[195]]
President Roosevelt was led to a similar conclusion by the frank and manly stand taken by Paul Morton in his testimony in the Dressed-meat Hearings, Jan. 7, 1902. In a letter to Mr. Morton, June 12, 1905, the President says: “At the time when you gave this testimony the Interstate Commerce Law in the matter of rebates was practically a dead letter. Every railroad man admitted privately that he paid no heed whatever to it, and the Interstate Commerce Commission had shown itself absolutely powerless to secure this heed. When I took up the matter and endeavored to enforce obedience to the law on the part of the railroads in the question of rebates, I encountered violent opposition from the great bulk of the railroad men and a refusal by all of those to whom I spoke to testify in public to the very state of affairs which they freely admitted to me in private. You alone stated that you would do all in your power to break up this system of giving rebates.” It was this, the President says, that led him to invite Mr. Morton to take a place in the Cabinet.
The high character and ability of Mr. Morton and President Ripley and the fact that the Santa Fe management seems to represent high-water mark in railroad honesty, gives great importance to the Santa Fe cases, and the attitude of her leading officers towards the law, and the principle of impartial treatment of shippers.
Paul Morton is reported to have said to a representative of the Chicago Daily News, December 31, 1904: “What Mr. Biddle did was exactly right, in my judgment, and if I had been in his place I should have done the same thing.” And President Ripley is stated to have said to a reporter for the Inter-Ocean, “It was not rebating. It was simply a figure agreed upon by private contract. Mr. Paul Morton was cognizant of it, and though his name may not be affixed to the order, he was the man from whom Mr. Biddle, the freight traffic manager, got authority to haul coal for the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company on the terms named.”
“Did you also know of it, Mr. Ripley?”
“Why, yes, as I know of all of our business. I consider it absolutely legitimate, and will do it again to-morrow if I like.”
Knowing that serious misrepresentations have appeared in the papers,—for example, that Mr. Morton was a stockholder in the Colorado Fuel Company, and recreant to Atchison interests, which was untrue, as Mr. Morton had sold his stock in the Fuel Company and all its auxiliaries when he left its employ before entering the service of the Atchison in 1895—knowing the frailty of newspaper reports I wrote to President Ripley and Paul Morton asking if it were true that they had said Mr. Biddle did right in making the arrangement with the Colorado Fuel Company in respect to the rates to Deming, etc. They replied as follows: