The strongest arguments in favor of government ownership of railroads are:
First. Under modern conditions, the railroads are simply the public highways over which freight and passengers must pass, and public highways should never be owned by private citizens.
If freight and passengers go by water route, they must use navigable rivers, bays, gulfs, oceans. These public waterways belong to the public, and all men admit that they should.
Under modern conditions, freight and passengers are compelled to go by rail. We have to use the railroads whether we want to or not. In traveling any distance, it is no longer possible for the public to transact business by the use of the dirt roads, consequently the transportation lines are public in their nature and their uses, and should belong to the public.
They were not built by private capital, as a rule. In almost every case the railroads were paid for by public and private donations, and the charters granted represented simply a license issued for a public purpose; and of course that license can be revoked at any time, just compensation for vested interests first having been paid.
Second. As now operated, the railroads are ruinously oppressive in their charges. Enormous sums of money are being wrung from the people to pay dividends on watered stock—a fictitious value which has no existence except in ink on paper.
Third. Under the present system, the railroads have co-operated with excessive tariff rates in building up the trust, which publicly says to the people: “Pay my price for food, or starve”; “Pay my price for tools to work with, or let your fields become deserts.”
By the secret rebate, by discriminations of one kind or another, the independent operator has been driven out of the field everywhere and the tyranny of the trusts established.
Fourth. It would remove the greater part of the corruption which is the bane of our politics.
Railroad corporations maintain their lobbyists at the capital of the nation and at the capital of every state. They corrupt representatives, judges, aldermen, editors, politicians.