llows, and trying to prevent each of the
five hundred from absorbing an undue share of the traffic. It appears
that each of these costly peace-making attachments has an average of
seven corporations to watch.

Referring to traffic associations, and their vain endeavors to keep
the corporations within sight of commercial ethics, the Interstate
Commerce Commission says: "But the most important provisions of the
law have not so often been directly violated as they have
been nullified through devices, carefully framed with legal
assistance,--here is one of the places where the high-priced lawyer
gets in his work--with a view to this very end, and in the belief that
when brought to legal test the device hit upon would not be held by
the courts to be so distinctly opposed to the terms of the law as to
be criminally punishable." In this connection, it is well to remember
what Mr. Dillon tells us of the ease with which the laws can be
evaded.

With national ownership the expenditures involved in the maintenance
of traffic associations would be saved, and railway users relieved of
a tax that, judging from the reports of a limited number of
corporations of their contributions towards the support of such
organizations, must annually amount to between four and five million
dollars.

Of the six hundred corporations operating railways, probably five
hundred maintain costly general offices, where president, treasurer,
and secretary pass the time surrounded by an expensive staff. The
majority of such offices are off the lines of the respective
corporations, in the larger cities, where high rents are paid, and
great expenses entailed, that proper attention may be given to the
bolstering or depressing the price of the corporation's shares, as the
management may be long or short of the market. So far as the utility
of the railways is concerned as instruments of anything but
speculation, such offices and officers might as well be located in the
moon, and their cost saved to the public. The average yearly cost of
such offices (and officers) is more than $50,000, and the transfer of
the railways to the nation would, in this matter alone, effect an
annual saving of more than $25,000,000, as both offices and officials
could be dispensed with, and the service be no less efficient.

Moreover, with the nation owning the railways, the indirect but no
less onerous tax levied upon the industries of the country, by the
thousands of speculators