court from the court of the State Railway Commissioners, thus either subordinating or conforming all State railway statutes to the Federal statute of Interstate Commerce, amending the railway statutes to the statute of Interstate Commerce in as far and as often as the same may he amended or altered or enlarged by the Federal Congress.
The first of these remedies?—the Government purchase and operation of railways—I have so fully and at length discussed in these pages that it would seem superfluous to touch the matter further, unless the reasons then given to show that the project was impracticable and impossible (or, if practicable and possible, then unconstitutional) can be disposed of. I may briefly state that the principal of those reasons were: first, that the immense number of competing railways would make the operation of more than one of them between terminals an act of bankruptcy on the part of the Government (which would attempt to compete with itself), while to discontinue a competing road would be to deprive local stations of business facilities to which they would be entitled as well as the terminals; and, secondly, as above stated, that to operate the five hundred railways in the United States, or any considerable number of them, would necessitate a civil service so enormous and costly that, even if administered with the most rigid economy, it would absolutely and superlatively realize for this people the worst effects which the most hectic of the popular railway reformers have prophesied from the continuance of the present system. In addition to these practical objections the constitutional objection was, that the purchase of our railways would be impossible at present, whatever it might have once been, since no price at which the railway plants could be purchased could be arrived at. To purchase them at more than their value would be a robbery of the non-railway public; to purchase them at less than their value would be a robbery of the owners of the railways; while to purchase them at their exact value, admitting that it could be reckoned, would be in itself a confiscation (and so a robbery), as forcing innocent holders to relinquish such legitimate investments for their capital as they had lawfully seen fit to select.
As to the second remedy, there is, I think, something indeed, a great deal to be said in its favor, not only from the side of the railway companies, but from the side of the people of this country (from the shippers, as we may perhaps call the non-railroad operating population; of course, an enormous majority of the whole). And as to this I respectfully offer the following considerations, not in behalf of the railways, but of the customers of the railways.
Congress has more than once passed a national bankruptcy act, and, I believe, always with beneficial results. Moreover, I
