or correct this by arbitrary legislation. It is not possible to draft an intelligible and workable regulation to do it. The short-haul clause in the bill now before the Senate is already a subject of disputed interpretation, and whenever the courts come to act upon it they will interpret it as its language seems to require, not as anybody now says that it is intended to mean. The interests of the extreme West constantly demand that the full power of railroads to annihilate distance and time shall be exerted in their favor; during the last summer, Senator Edmunds pointed out to his Vermont constituents their grievance, in the fact that railroads pour into the Eastern market, in competition with them, all the products of the West — i.e., do just what the West demands. Cheap freights westward benefit Eastern manufacturers and Western consumers while they injure Western manufacturers; cheap freights eastward favor Western farmers and cattle raisers and Eastern consumers while they injure Eastern farmers. How can the legislator meddle in this great complex of interests without doing harm to everybody, especially when he goes about it without any theoretical or practical principles to guide him, with nothing but the conviction that many things in the existing order are not as we should like them to be and that something must be done?
The railroad question, properly speaking, I repeat, goes far beyond the points which are now attracting attention. The railroad company has relations to its employees, to the state which taxes its property, to the municipalities whose streets its line crosses, to adjoining real-estate owners, to the legislators and editors who want free passes, etc., etc. In all these relations there are two parties, for even a railroad company has rights. Competing lines have relations to each other, and these
