by the Commission, only 8, or less than one fifth, were sustained by the courts, all of which involved unjust discriminations (always a difficult question in our complicated commercial life), and not a single case involved an exorbitant rate. Of the total number of complaints made to the Commission, 8319, or 91 per cent, were of so simple and unimportant a character that they were disposed of informally.
During these eighteen years the separate freight transactions of the railways in the United States were in excess of 3,000,000,000, or there was one complaint for each 330,000 separate commercial transactions, and not a single serious complaint about exorbitant rates. Certainly a marvelous record of compliance with a law, and one not equaled anywhere in the history of the statutes regulating human conduct, — a compliance that should refute completely the idea that the railway business needs some peculiar treatment by law that is not required by other business and the idea that the railways do not try to obey the law.
