Mr. Hadley's labors as a railroad author have, it seems, greatly increased his corporation bias. In an address which he delivered before the American Bankers' Association at New Orleans in November, 1891, upon the subject of "Recent Railroad Legislation and its Effects upon the Finances of the Country," he made a number of assertions which ill comport with the fairness of a public statistician or the wisdom of a Yale professor. After a few introductory remarks, Prof. Hadley made the following statement:

"Every one knows that railroad property has fallen in value since the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act four years and a half ago; few have made any accurate estimate of the amount of that fall. Let us take the stock of the leading railroad systems centering in Chicago as a type. Here we find an aggregate shrinkage of over $60,000,000, or more than one-quarter of the par value of the stocks.

Par Value.Price.Shrinkage.
Apr. 4, 1887.Nov. 4, 1891.
C., M. & St. P. $30,904,261 93 75 $5,560,000
C., M. & St. P. Preferred 21,555,900122119 647,000
C. & N. W. 31,365,900121116 1,568,000
C. & N. W. Preferred 22,325,454148139 2,009,000
C., R. I. &; P. 41,960,000126 82 18,462,000
C., B. & Q. 77,540,500140 98 32,567,000
Total$225,651,000 $60,815,000"

The table shows that fifty-one million of these sixty million dollars are the shrinkage of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific and the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy stocks. It is surprising that Prof. Hadley should be ignorant of the real causes of this depreciation, which are known to nearly every Granger in the West. In 1887 the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad Company owned 1,121 miles of road, only 172 of which were outside of the States of Illinois and Iowa. In 1891 the same company owned 2,725 miles of road, with 1,776 miles outside of Illinois and Iowa and scattered through Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Indian Territory and Oklahoma. In Kansas alone the Rock Island system grew from two miles in 1887 to 1,059 miles in 1891. In other words, to a little over a thousand miles of good road the company's managers added nearly 2,000 miles of poor road and a proportionate amount of new stock, and the depreciation in the company's stock which followed was no greater than one should have expected under such circumstances. The managers of the Rock Island and the promoters of these new lines found the transactions to their advantage, while the original stockholders of the company had to bear the imposition, as hundreds of thousands of railroad stockholders had done before them. But neither the law of Congress nor that of any State was to blame for this depreciation of the Rock Island stock.

Since 1891, railroad stocks have advanced on an average at least twenty per cent., and during the last sixty days have declined about twenty-five per cent., although there has been no essential change in interstate or State legislation. It is certainly as fair to call the advance the ultimate result of restrictive railroad legislation as to attribute to that legislation the shrinkage above referred to. Extensive speculations similar to those just mentioned were, during the same period, indulged in by the managers of the C., B. & Q. Railroad Company and its protegé, the C., B. & N., who, in addition to this, greatly injured their road in 1888 by the unjust provocation of the engineers' strike. So destructive were this strike and its consequences to the company's business that it is difficult to account for the motives of those who provoked and stubbornly prolonged it except upon the theory that it played an important role in their stock manipulations.

But the recent legislation of a considerable number of States has, in Prof. Hadley's opinion, been still more detrimental to railroad interests than that of Congress. He says;

"In the second place, the legislatures of several States, stimulated by the example of Congress, hastened to pass in imitation, of the Interstate Commerce Act, laws which, in many instances, went far beyond their model in point of stringency. Examples are furnished by the statutes of Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota and South Carolina in 1887-88; of Florida in 1888-89, and of no less than thirteen States in 1889-90, viz.: Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Virginia, Wyoming; as well as by the recently adopted Constitution of Kentucky. The legislation of 1890-91 shows a slight reaction against the movement of the three years previous.

"In two respects the State legislatures went quite beyond the scope of the Interstate Commerce Act. They tried to prescribe safety appliances to the operating department, and rates to the traffic department. Of the first of these groups little need be said, except that as a rule they have failed to accomplish any great progress toward the result in view, and have in some instances actually hindered such progress. The attempt at prescribing rates was more serious. It involved a return to the methods of the Granger legislation, fifteen years earlier, which had operated so disastrously upon the railroads and the public alike. The system of commissioners with powers to make schedules which should be at least prima facie evidence of reasonable rates had, during the intervening period, never been wholly abandoned; but the powers thus conferred had been sparingly exercised. It was either left unused, as was generally the case in the North from 1877 to 1887, or the schedule rates were put so high as not to interfere with good railroad economy, of which examples are seen in Georgia and other parts of the South. But from the year 1887 onward there was a pressure upon the Commissioners to make schedules, and to make them low; and lest these boards should not be able to reflect the popular feeling directly enough, they were, in some instances, no longer to be appointed by the Governor, but elected by popular vote. The law which was most severely applied and attracted most public attention was that of Iowa.... The agitation against the railroads has many points in common with the land agitation in Ireland. Absentee ownership is at the bottom of the trouble in either case. Property is owned in one place and used in another, and the users, not satisfied with the conditions of use, insist on taking the business direction into their own hands. They claim the right to fix rates in Iowa for the same general reasons by which they claim the right to fix rents in Ireland."

It must be presumed that Mr. Hadley is ignorant of the fact that under the Iowa Commissioners' tariff the gross earnings of the Iowa railroads increased $7,000,000, or more than 17 per cent., in about three years, and their net revenue increased in proportion. Never have the railroads or the people of Iowa enjoyed a healthier prosperity than they do at present. It is true that the State of Iowa denies to the railroad companies the right to charge what they please; but this claim does not prevent them from doing justice to the absentee owner of railroad property. That absentee owners of property are disposed to take undue advantage of those who use it is illustrated in the very case which Mr. Hadley cites. So flagrant was the injustice done by the English landlord to the Irish tenant that the English Parliament was constrained to interfere and correct it.

Mr. Hadley says further: