[VII]
PUBLIC SERVICE OF THE RAILWAYS
It is the reproach of our system of government statistics of railways that their first concern is financial results, which the government takes no thought to improve, and the harrowing roll of accidents, and not the adequacy of the service and the steady development of the means of transportation. Every month, almost every week, the public is informed of the volume of traffic, and every quarter the record of casualties is told in sensational head lines. It is left for belated annual reports to record the public service of this great industry upon whose progressive efficiency every other industry in the United States depends.
It is not upon what the railways earn, but upon what they DO that the whole industrial fabric of the republic rests. It is not upon the dividends they pay but upon the traffic they carry, the net income withheld from dividends and put into improvements, that their success as carriers depends.
The Passenger Traffic.
In considering the public service of the railways it is customary to give first attention to the passenger traffic. This is not because it is the most important branch of the service but because passengers are numbered by millions, where thousands suffice in the enumeration of the shippers, who frequently mistake themselves for the entire American people.
In twenty years between June 1, 1889, and June 1, 1909, the population of the United States increased from 61,289,000 to 88,806,000, or nearly 45%. In the meantime the passenger cars provided by the railways increased from 24,586 to 46,026, or over 87%. But this does not measure the liberal provision made by the railway for the travelling public, which is more fully and accurately expressed by the amazing growth of the number of passengers carried one mile from 11,553,820,445 in 1889 to approximately 29,452,000,000 in 1909, or nearly 155%.
Here is shown an increase of cars not far short of double the increase in population and an increase in passengers carried proportionately greater than the numerical increase in cars.
In the meantime the average receipts of the traffic have declined from 2.165 cents per passenger mile in 1889 to 1.916 in 1909—a decline of over 11%, although every item involved in the service, locomotives, cars, track, stations, labor, etc., cost more. The passenger service, except as precursor to the freight service, and in certain densely populated sections, was unremunerative in 1889 and is more so now. It is maintained at the expense of the freight service by what the Railroad Commission of Wisconsin has characterized as "a species of piracy practiced upon the shippers of freight."