yer, or to hundreds of others. I pointed out that, if rigidly enforced, the act would amount to a confiscation of private property; since, if the investment of private capital in any business can be compelled to make charges for services in accordance with a tariff not framed with any reference to the capital invested or the value of the service rendered; or if the value of services can be estimated by the person served, and paid for only in accordance with his estimate, and without hearing from the party performing the service, the value of private property invested in plants used to render services to others than its owner would speedily disappear. In other words, the principle upon which the Interstate Commerce Act appeared to me to proceed was one which, if pronounced proper, would justify—and if rigidly enforced might even result in—the operation of all railways by the Government. But, however that policy might work in European countries, it seemed to me impossible of other than despotic and ruinous application in the United States with its five hundred railways, their vast united capital and their enormous aggregate of fixed indebtedness held in the shape of negotiable securities, and very largely held in England and upon the European continent. At least it seemed to me impossible without a peremptory, and so a paternal, fixing of values at which the Government should acquire the railway road-beds and plants, not to mention the creation of a tremendous civil list, which in itself would probably precipitate the very evils and tyrannies which the socialists and alarmists foresaw from the private ownership of railways, and the consequent accumulation of occasional private fortunes beyond the actual appreciation of services of the employments of capital.
The Interstate Commerce Act has now been in operation about four years. Its enforcement, so far from being rigid, has been marked by extreme leniency and enlightened judgment upon the part of the commission appointed to administer it—a judgment in which the echoes of public clamor or the verdicts of the marketplace have found no recognition; and the result has been, it seems to me, an entirely unforeseen situation one still more favorable to the railway companies and charitable to their procedure, if possible, than was the situation—prior to the enactment of any Interstate Commerce law whatever. Before proceeding to demonstrate a few of the anomalies of this, from my own standpoint, entirely satisfactory condition of affairs, it is only fair to the railway companies to state that they, immediately upon the appointment of the commission, began to enforce the most implicit obedience to the letter of the Interstate Commerce law, and that—whatever diplomacy there may have been on their part—it has never resulted in the administration in a single case of the penal processes with which the commission was empowered by
