ome $30,000,000 for
the benefit of the favored minority; hence it is evident that if all
were required to pay for railway services, as they are for mail
services, the rates might be reduced ten per cent. or more, and the
corporate revenues be no less, and the operating expenses no more. In
no other country--unless it be under the same system in Canada--are
nine tenths of the people taxed to pay the travelling expenses of the
other tenth. By what right do the corporations tax the public that
members of Congress, legislators, judges, and other court officials
and their families may ride free? Why is it that when a legislature is
in session passes are as plentiful as leaves in the forest in autumn?

The writer, as an executive officer of a railway company having
authority to issue passes, has, during a session of the legislature,
signed vast numbers of blank passes at the request of the legislative
agents of such company, and under instructions of the president of the
corporation to furnish such lobby agents with all the passes they
should ask for. No reports of passes issued are made either to State
or federal governments, or to confiding shareholders, and should such
reports be asked for, by State or nation, in order to measure the
extent of this evil, the Sidney Dillons would rush into print and tell
us it was a piece of impertinence for any citizen (or the public) to
inquire into the extent of or the manner in which the corporations
dispensed their favors. The only way to kill this monster is to put
the instruments of transportation under such control as only national
ownership can give. Laws and agreements between the corporations have
been proven, time and again, wholly ineffective even to lessen this
great and corrupting evil.

In every conceivable way are the net revenues of the corporations
depleted, and needless burthens imposed upon the public, but one of
the worst is the system of paying commissions for the diversion of
traffic to particular lines, often the least direct. The more common
practice is to pay such commissions to agents of connecting lines
where it is possible to send the traffic over any one of two or more
routes, and the one which may, by the payment of such commission,
secure the carrying of the passenger (or merchandise) may be the least
desirable, and the one which would never have been taken but for the
prevarications of an agent bribed by a commission to make false
representations as to th