Mr. Adams has, from his long association with railroad managers, imbibed one heresy which is in strange discord with the general soundness of his opinions. He holds that the railroad system was left to develop upon a false basis, inasmuch as the American people relied for protecting the community from abuses upon general laws authorizing the freest possible railroad construction everywhere and by any one. It can therefore not be surprising that Mr. Adams is an advocate of the legalized pool. He is of the opinion that secret combinations among railroads, inasmuch as they always have existed, always will exist as long as the railroad system continues as it now is. Hence he proposes to legalize a practice which the law cannot prevent, and by so doing to enable the railroads to confederate themselves in a manner which shall be at once both public and responsible. The reply might be made that there are many other conspiracies which the law cannot always prevent, but that this is no reason why conspiracies should be legalized. If pools and other railroad abuses had, since the beginning of the railroad era, been treated as crimes and misdemeanors, and punished as such by the imposition of heavy fines, few people would to-day be ready to offer apologies for them. If the time shall ever come when pools must be legalized it will be time for railroad control equivalent to Government ownership.
Among the more recent writers upon railroad subjects is W. D. Dabney, late chairman of the Committee on Railways and Internal Navigation in the Legislature of Virginia. Mr. Dabney favors State control, and is, on the whole, friendly to the Interstate Commerce Act. He sees danger in the pool, but inclines to the belief that the public benefit derived from the pooling system outweighs the danger of public detriment from its existence. The following is his chief argument for a legalized pool: "Perhaps, so long as railroad companies continue to enjoy an absolute monopoly of transportation over their own lines, so that free competition is restricted in its operation to a comparatively few favored points, it may be worthy of serious consideration whether it would not be better to legalize than to prohibit pooling, taking care to put the whole matter under strict public supervision and control. The companies would then be left comparatively free to bring their local rates into something like harmony with the long-distance rates, and should they fail to do so where the needs of the local community and their revenues make it proper to be done, then it is the function of public regulation to compel it to be done."
Of the Interstate Commerce Act Mr. Dabney says: "The legislation recently enacted by Congress for the regulation of commerce by railway is the result of more careful and intelligent deliberation perhaps than any other measure of similar character, and it is not unlikely that the legislation of many of the States will sooner or later be conformed to it."
He speaks at some length of the drift toward railroad centralization. A few extracts from this passage may be here given: "That the tendency towards the unification and consolidation of different and competitive lines has been decidedly increased by the anti-pooling and the long and short haul sections of the Interstate Commerce Law can hardly be doubted.... The modern device of the 'trust' as a means of unifying industrial interests and eliminating competition had not yet been applied in the field of railroad transportation.... The scheme of trust here briefly outlined would probably require for its successful operation the concurrence of the entire stockholding interest of each company embraced in it; and herein, it seems likely, will be found the chief difficulty in perfecting such a scheme. Should it ever be perfected, a far more stringent public supervision and control of the railroad transportation of the country will be demanded."
Another author, Charles Whitney Baker, associate editor of the Engineering News, suggests in his book, "Monopolies and the People," a plan for the reorganization of our railroad system, to remedy the evils of monopoly which are at present connected with railroad management. The following quotation from his work outlines the system proposed: "Let the Government acquire the title of the franchise, permanent way and real estate of all the railway lines in the country. Let a few corporations be organized under Government auspices, and let each, by the terms of its charter, receive a perpetual lease of all the railway lines built, or to be built, within a given territory. Let the territory of each of these corporations be so large, and so planned with regard to its neighbors, that there shall be, so far as possible, no competition between them. For instance, one corporation would operate all the lines south of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi River; another all lines east of the Hudson and of Lake Champlain, etc. Let the terms of rental of these lines be about 3-1/4 per cent. on the road's actual 'present cost' (the sum of money it would cost to rebuild it entirely at present prices of material and labor), less a due allowance for depreciation. The corporations would be obliged to keep the property in as good condition as when received, and would own absolutely all their rolling-stock, machinery, etc." The proposed reform measures, it must be admitted, are very good in theory, but their practical application is unfortunately entirely out of the question under our system of government.
Mr. John M. Bonham is the author of a recent work entitled "Railway Secrecy and Trusts." This writer, upon the whole, takes advanced ground in dealing with the question of railroad reform. He deems the present interstate legislation inadequate to correct all the graver railroad evils, expressing his views upon this subject as follows:
"Railway construction continues to increase in the United States with immense rapidity. Concurrent with this increase, and notwithstanding all the efforts that have been made at restraint, the aggressions upon political and industrial rights increase also. Nor is it likely that without more rigorous control than is now exercised these aggressions will be any less active than they are to-day. It is coming to be pretty generally realized that the Interstate Commerce legislation has not fulfilled the expectation of its friends. But this is a frequent trait of tentative legislation. It is not reasonable to expect that the first efforts to solve a problem the factors of which are so hidden and complex will be followed by complete success."
Concerning the changes needed to make Government regulation in the United States more effective, he says:
"A reform which would deal with an elaborate system of evil cannot, therefore, be confined to treating consequences, the separate instances of the system. There must be a power which can go behind these and grapple with causes. There must, therefore, be something more than a court. There must be a commission, a department of government which will provide organized supervision and inspection against which the quasi-public corporation can claim no privacy as inviolable. Such a department must be clothed with the power to ascertain precisely where and how the evils of the present methods originate, and when these are ascertained it must be able to apply the remedy at the source of evil. The remedial force must be of a preventive kind."
A few grave misstatements of historical facts greatly mar Mr. Bonham's book. He makes, for instance, the following statement: