The letter contains other misstatements equally grave. Mr. A. B. Stickney, the president of the Chicago, St. Paul and Kansas City Railroad, in his recent excellent work, "The Railway Problem," reviews Mr. Mitchell's letter as follows:
"Mr. Mitchell states the average rate per mile in 1873 for passengers at 3.42 cents. It was well understood that this was an average rate received from those passengers who paid anything, and that, had the average rate been obtained by using as a divisor the total number of paying passengers plus the number of those who rode free the average would have been much below three cents, the price fixed by the law, and consequently, if the company would collect the legal rate from all alike and abolish the free list, its revenues from the passenger business would be increased rather than decreased. If the same test is applied to the freight rates it becomes equally evident that this statute did not reduce the rates in Wisconsin below the average rate of 2.50 cents per ton per mile, which, according to Mr. Mitchell's statement, was the average for the year 1873. For proof, it may be stated that the law classified freight into four general classes, to be designated as first, second, third and fourth classes, and into seven special classes, to be designated as D, E, F, G, H, I and J. The rates on the four general classes were made the same as were 'charged for carrying freights in said four general classes on said railroads on the first day of June, 1873,' and the rate per ton per mile was fixed at certain rates for the first twenty-five miles, a less for the second twenty-five miles, and a fixed rate per mile after, as follows:
| 1st 25 Miles. | 2nd 25 Miles. | All Over 50 Miles. | |
| D | 4-4/5 cents. | 3-1/5 cents. | 1-3/5 cents. |
| E | Same as class above. | ||
| F | 4 cents. | 2 cents. | 1 cent. |
| G | 3-1/5 cents. | 2 cents. | 1 cent. |
| H | 4 cents. | 2-4/5 cents. | 1-3/5 cents. |
| I | 4-2/5 cents. | 2-2/5 cents. | 1-1/5 cents. |
| J | 3-1/5 cents. | 2-2/5 cents. | 1 cent. |
"When it is considered, in connection with these figures, that the four general classes were left by the legislature under the same tariffs as had been enforced by the companies, and, as a rule, first class is three times the rate of class D, and third and fourth class materially higher, the evidence seems conclusive that the rates fixed by law would produce an average materially higher than the average of the whole year, stated by Mr. Mitchell at 2-1/2 cents. It seems also probable that, had the rates fixed by this law been applied to the whole business of the line, the interstate as well as the State traffic, it would still have produced a larger average. The latter of course is the proper test. There are little inaccuracies in the material facts as stated by Mr. Mitchell which were pointed out at once. For example: In his tabulated statement of passenger earnings per mile, averaging the gross earnings from transportation of passengers who paid any fare, and omitting the large number who went free, the rate is stated at 3 42-100 cents per mile; then he says: 'The law in question proposes to reduce our passenger rate twenty-five per cent.,' which would have reduced the rate to 2.57 cents per mile, while, the rate fixed by the law complained of was three cents per mile. Then Mr. Mitchell proceeds: 'And our freight rates about the same; thus deducting from our present tariff about twenty-five per cent. of our gross earnings.' It was immediately pointed out that the law only applied to strictly State business; that is, to traffic that originated and ended in the State of Wisconsin. All other traffic was interstate commerce, and could not be controlled by State legislation. The volume of business which would be affected by the law would therefore be comparatively small—estimated at not over ten per cent., of the total traffic of the line. Hence, if the rates fixed by the law were twenty-five per cent. less than the rates the company had been in the habit of collecting (which was denied), it could not possibly have 'deducted from its present tariff' more than two and one-half per cent., instead of twenty-five per cent. as stated by Mr. Mitchell.
"It was claimed that the facts were, that the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Company, in its efforts to bankrupt the Lake Superior and Mississippi Company, had many of its interstate rates so low that it had resulted in loss, and that its other rates had been made unreasonably high in order to recoup this loss, and that the State of Wisconsin was compelled to pay a part of the expense of the transportation of favored sections of the State of Minnesota."
All through the Granger contests the railways have weakened the force of their arguments by their misrepresentation of facts and by their extravagant predictions of ruin. The companies were continually proclaiming: 'If this or that is done, it will ruin us; it will ruin the State,' when, in fact, a road cannot be mentioned that has suffered from State legislation. Nineteen years ago no railroad manager could have written what Mr. Stickney writes to-day, and few railroad managers would write to-day what Mr. Mitchell wrote then. And yet, such is the change which public sentiment is undergoing upon these questions, that the utterances of many of our present railroad authors will appear as absurd a few years hence as Mr. Mitchell's letter of nineteen years ago appears to us now.
Many railroad attorneys have since been guilty of resorting to the sophistry employed by President Mitchell in that strange letter which he addressed to the Governor of Wisconsin. Even so distinguished a gentleman as Hon. James W. McDill, now a member of the Interstate Commerce Commission, made in 1888, as a member of a railroad lobby, the following remarkable statements before the Railroad Committee of the General Assembly of Iowa, in a speech opposing a proposed reduction of the passenger rate of first-class roads from three to two cents per mile:
"The proposition, if confined to the first-class roads of Iowa, proposes a one-third reduction of their revenues from passenger business.... We have earned in Iowa by first-class roads annually about $13,000,000, and a reduction of one cent, or from a rate of three cents to two, will reduce their revenues about $5,000,000 a year.... Thus it is seen that it is proposed to take from the revenues of a part of the railroads of Iowa, annually, almost as much as all the railroads of Iowa have paid for taxes in nine years ($6,549,505.84)."
Mr. McDill was a member of the Iowa Railroad Commission for several years. He may, therefore, be presumed to have known that the State of Iowa could not, and did not propose to, regulate interstate traffic, and that the thirteen million dollars railroad revenue to which he referred was derived both from interstate and State traffic; that the latter was only about one-fourth of the former, and that therefore the proposed reduction on the basis of schedule rates would have cut down the net revenue of the roads only about one million instead of five million dollars. But Mr. McDill himself states that the average rate earned by all the railroads of the United States was, for the year 1886, only 2.181 cents per passenger per mile. It certainly was not over 2-1/2 cents per mile for the first-class roads of Iowa. Thus the proposed reduction, instead of being one cent per mile, as stated by Mr. McDill, was only one-half cent per mile; and it only applied to the local business of the first-class roads. In other words, the bill under consideration, had it been enacted into law, would have caused a reduction of 20 per cent. on about 25 per cent. of the total revenue from passenger business of the first-class roads, or of five per cent. on their total income from passenger traffic in the State of Iowa. It will be noticed that Mr. McDill in his calculation made no allowance whatever for the increase of business which would have followed such a reduction. The gain from this source would probably have greatly exceeded the loss due to this small reduction in the fare. In the same address Mr. McDill made many other equally fallacious statements.
One of the most devoted advocates of the interests of railroad managers is Marshall M. Kirkman. He is the author of a number of books and pamphlets upon railway subjects, among them a pamphlet entitled "The Relation of the Railroads of the United States to the People and the Commercial and Financial Interests of the Country."