ch represented for the most part
an honest attempt to fulfill a neglected responsibility, but whose
effort on the whole merely embarrassed the operations of the roads, and
which in many instances failed to protect the real public interests
involved. Even when this legislation was not ignorantly and unwisely
conceived, and even when it was prepared by well-informed and
well-intentioned men, it was informed by contradictory ideas and a false
conception of the genuine abuses and their necessary remedies.
Consequently, a certain fraction of intelligent and disinterested public
opinion began soon to realize that the results of a vigorous attempt on
the part of the state governments to use their powers and to fulfill
their responsibilities in respect to the railroads were actually worse
and more dangerous to the public interest than was the previous neglect.
The neglect of the responsibility implied corruption, because it
provoked blackmail. The vigorous fulfillment of the responsibility
implied confusion, cross-purposes, and excessive severity, because the
powers of a single state were too great within its specific jurisdiction
and absolutely negligible beyond.

The railroad companies suffer more from this piecemeal and conflicting
regulation than do corporations engaged in manufacturing operations, not
only because they discharge a peculiarly public function, but because
their business, particularly in its rate-making aspect, suffers severely
from any division by arbitrary geographical lines. But all large
inter-state corporations are more or less in the same situation.
Corporations such as the Standard Oil Company and some of the large New
York life insurance companies are confronted by the alternative either
of going out of business in certain states, or of submitting to
restrictions which would compromise the efficiency of their whole
business policy. Doubtless they have not exhausted the evasive and
dilatory methods which have served them so well in the past; but little
by little the managers of these corporations are coming to realize that
they are losing more than they gain from subjection to so many
conflicting and supplementary jurisdictions. Little by little they are
coming to realize that the only way in which their businesses can obtain
a firm legal standing is by means of Federal recognition and exclusive
Federal regulation. They would like doubtless to continue to escape any
effective regulation at all; but wit