"Many believe stringent laws, enforced by commissions having judicial power, will serve the desired end, and the writer was long hopeful of the efficacy of regulation by State and National commissions; but close observation of their endeavors and of the constant efforts—too often successful—of the corporations to place their tools on such commissions, and to evade all laws and regulations, have convinced him that such control is and must continue to be ineffective and that the only hope of just and impartial treatment for railway users is to exercise the 'right of eminent domain,' condemn the railways, and pay their owners what it would cost to duplicate them; and in this connection it may be well to state what valuations some of the corporations place upon their properties.
"Some years since the Santa Fe filed in the counties on its line a statement showing that at the then price of labor and materials—rails were double the present price—their road could be duplicated for $9,685 per mile, and, the materials being much worn, the actual cash value of the road did not exceed $7,725 per mile.
"In 1885 the superintendent of the St. Louis and Iron Mountain Railway, before the Arkansas State Board of Assessors, swore that he could duplicate such a railway for $11,000 per mile, and yet Mr. Gould has managed to float its securities, notwithstanding a capitalization of five times that amount."
Among the advantages to be derived from Government ownership he names the following:
"First would be the stability and practical uniformity of rates, now impossible, as they are subject to change by hundreds of officials, and are often made for the purpose of enriching such officials....
"It would place the rate-making power in one body, with no inducement to act otherwise than fairly and impartially, and this would simplify the whole business and relegate an army of traffic managers, general freight agents, soliciting agents, brokers, scalpers and hordes of traffic association officials to more useful callings, while relieving the honest user of the railway of intolerable burdens.
"Under corporate control, railways and their officials have taken possession of the majority of mines which furnish the fuel so necessary to domestic and industrial life, and there are few coal fields where they do not fix the price at which so essential an article shall be sold, and the whole nation is thus forced to pay undue tribute.
"Controlling rates and the distribution of cars, railway officials have driven nearly all the mine owners, who have not railways or railway officials for partners, to the wall.
"With the Government operating the railways, discriminations would cease, as would individual and local oppression; and we may be sure that an instant and absolute divorce would be decreed between railways and their officials on one side, and commercial enterprises of every name and kind on the other.
"The failure to furnish equipment to do the business of the tributary country promptly is one of the greater evils of corporate administration, enabling officials to practice most injurious and oppressive forms of discrimination, and is one that neither Federal nor State commission pays much attention to. With national ownership a sufficiency of cars would be provided. On many roads the funds that should have been devoted to furnishing the needed equipment, and which the corporations contracted to provide when they accepted their charters, have been divided as construction profits, or, as in the case of the Santa Fe, Union Pacific, and many others, diverted to the payment of unearned dividends, while the public suffers from this failure to comply with charter obligations.