. The
unflinching use of powers, vaguely sketched above, would be sufficient
to prevent mere abuses, and they could be granted without making any
body of officials personally responsible for any of the essential
details of corporation management.

If the commission is granted the power to promulgate rates, to control
the service granted to the public, or to order the purchase of new
equipment, it has become more than a regulative official body. It has
become responsible for the business management of the corporation
committed to its charge; and again it must be asserted that mixed
control of this kind is bound to take the energy and initiative out of
such business organizations. Neither has any necessity for reducing
public service corporations to the level of industrial minors been
sufficiently demonstrated. In the matter of service and rates the
interest of a common carrier is not at bottom and in the long run
antagonistic to the interest of its patrons. The fundamental interest of
a common carrier is to develop traffic, and this interest coincides with
the interest in general of the communities it serves. This interest can
best be satisfied by allowing the carrier freedom in the making of its
schedules--subject only to review in particular cases. Special instances
may always exist of unnecessarily high or excessively discriminatory
rates; and provisions should be made for the consideration of such
cases, perhaps, by some court specially organized for the purpose; but
the assumption should be, on the whole, that the matter of rates and
service can be left to the interest of the corporation itself. In no
other way can the American economic system retain that flexibility with
which its past efficiency has been associated. In no other way can the
policy of these corporations continue to be, as it has so often been in
the past, in an economic sense genuinely constructive. This flexibility
frequently requires readjustments in the conditions of local industry
which cause grave losses to individuals or even communities; but it is
just such readjustments which are necessary to continued economic
efficiency; and it is just such readjustments which would tend to be
prevented by an official rate-making authority. An official rate-making
power would necessarily prefer certain rigid rules, favorable to the
existing distribution of population and business. Every tendency to a
new and more efficient distribution of trade would be ch