[RAILROADS AND THE PUBLIC]
By Hon. John C. Spooner.
From the address delivered at the annual dinner of the Railway Business Association, New York, November 10, 1909.
The topic which has been assigned to me is brief, but very large: "Railroads and the Public." It suggests nothing of humor, but everything of gravity and involves considerations which affect the prosperity of our whole people. The railroads, often berated in legislatures and in congresses as leechlike and piratical, are, after all, vital to the happiness of our people and to the progress of our industries and commerce. The people are apt to forget that they have been the greatest factors—I say the greatest factors—in the development of our resources and the enlargement of our commerce, both in times of war and in times of peace. If one would stop to think of what would have happened if, during the war for the preservation of the Union, we had been without railroads, ready and willing to serve the government upon its demand and at prices fixed by it, how long would the war have continued? And what might not have been its result? They carried troops from the North to the places of rendezvous in the fields; they enabled the government to transfer quickly from the East to the West, or the West to the East, as emergency demanded, troops essential to successful military operations. They carried munitions of war, they carried the mail to our soldiers, they carried food and raiment to those who were fighting under our flag.
And in time of peace, what would this country have been without the railroads? The railroad has been the advance courier of progress, of settlement, of production, of commerce. It is absolutely, and has been, indispensable to the government, to the commerce and to the happiness and comfort of our people. Its mission is not performed or fulfilled. Considered solely with reference to construction, there are new fields to be penetrated by them. Today men of courage and men of means are building railways with characteristic American energy in far off Alaska, to bring the gold mines and the coal mines and the timber and the unknown resources of that distant territory into the markets of the United States. If there is one instrumentality which above another has been a factor, appreciable by all thoughtful men, in making this country what it is, it is the railroad. And the railroad has kept abreast with the demands of commerce. Every device which ingenuity or invention has presented has been promptly adopted by the railway companies of the country. They have kept abreast of invention and improvement, until today the railway system of the United States is the most luxurious, the safest, the best managed railway system under the bending sky.
The first thing that would occur to one from this toast, the railroads being first mentioned, is what do the railroad companies owe to the public? That is easily defined. They owe it to the public to furnish safe roadbeds and equipment; they owe it to the public to furnish prompt service; they owe it to the public to treat all men, with obvious limitations, passengers and shippers under the same circumstances, equally and without unjust discrimination, and they owe to the public the duty of, as far as it is possible, so maintaining their roads and their equipment as to be able to meet in a fair way all the demands of commerce and traffic at reasonable rates. That excludes the rebate which never had any justification in logic or in fair play. I think those who hated it most were those who felt obliged to adopt it. When one railway company gave rebates it is quite manifest that the competitor was obliged to, or go out of business. And I believe that railway companies of the United States were glad, and their officers were glad, when it was made a penal offense for railway companies to give rebates. I think a railway company owes to the public to be careful in the selection of its employes; they should be capable, of course, and they should not only be capable, but they should be courteous and polite. To sum it up, you would say that what the railway in the enlarged sense—which includes details—owes to the public is just and fair treatment.
What does the public owe to the railway companies? Precisely, as I view it, the same thing, just and fair treatment. Only that and nothing more. Everybody knows that the railway companies of the United States—I won't put it that way—that the railway system of the United States never could have been created without the utilization of corporate entities. Partnerships never could have concentrated the capital necessary to that end. Only corporations could have achieved it. That was true in the past and it always will be true. Now, why is the railway company different from other corporations, most other corporations? One trouble with the general public is that they don't seem to understand—and they are not perhaps to be chided for it—their relation to the railway company. They think, and they are told, they have been told it in Congress, and they have been told it where one would least have expected it, that railway corporations are public corporations, and they have been taught to believe that their power over public corporations was supreme, which is not far from the truth; but the railway corporation is not a public corporation. The Supreme Court has many times decided that a railway company is a private corporation, that its property is private property, under the protection and safeguards of the Constitution of the United States against the public as well as against individuals who attack it. Then, wherein lies the difference between a private corporation engaged in manufacture and a railway corporation? Right here: A railway corporation can not construct its railway without being clothed with a power which is not given to the usual private corporation, a power which inheres in the sovereignty of the state, the ultimate power of the people delegated to the railway corporations and very few others, and that is the power to take your land without your will at a price fixed not by you but by a jury. Why? Because it is for the public use, and private interest and private sentiment can not be permitted to obstruct the interest of the state, and therefore the property of a railway company while it is private property is, as the Supreme Court of the United States has said, affected with the public interest.
A railway company serves the public, that is what it is organized to do. Those who apply for the corporate franchises do not apply for an altruistic purpose. They wish it because they think they can make profit out of it, and that is legitimate, but the state grants it for the public use. And so it comes about that the state has the power to regulate it. Mark what I say, to regulate it, to prevent it from exacting extortionate rates from the people; to prevent it from putting upon the people abuses in its management, but that does not mean that the state may take its property. That does not mean that the state may take its management out of the hands of its owners. It means simply that the state may protect the public from any abdication by it or violation by it of its duty as a common carrier, and this principle is too often forgotten.