the purpose of throttling their
weak competitors. Passenger rates, too, have been low to one class and
high to another; and the system of free passes has led to great abuses.
Discrimination between towns and cities and States has been hardly less
serious; and while the railways were permitted to make high local rates
and low through rates, a great stimulus was given to the city at the
expense of the country. The second class of evils is that rates in
themselves have been too high. The railways have been wastefully built
and then capitalized at double their actual cost, and it has been
attempted to pay dividends of 6 to 10 per cent. on these securities. In
some cases the principle of charging "what the traffic will bear" has
been so applied that industries have been ruined through the absorption
of their profits by unjust transportation charges. But our space will
not permit a comprehensive review of the many abuses of railway
management. They are already familiar to the public. We needed only to
refer to them sufficiently to carry on our argument by showing that the
railroad monopoly is not by any means a harmless monopoly if left to
work its own pleasure.

There are two evils of our present railway system, however, which are
not chargeable to monopoly, but to the _attempt to defeat monopoly_, and
which are important to our discussion. The first is the waste of
competition in railway traffic; the second, the waste of competition by
the construction and _threatened_ construction of competing lines where
present facilities are ample for the traffic. Of the first it need only
be said that in advertising, "drumming," and soliciting patronage the
railways spend many millions of dollars every year, which comes out of
the pockets of the public. The second is most serious, for it involves a
far greater waste. It is a conservative estimate to say that 5 per cent.
of the railways of the country were only built to divide the profits of
older roads, and that their owners would be delighted to-day to have
their money back in their possession and the railroad wiped out. The
millions these roads have cost, the millions required every year to
maintain and operate them, the millions spent on proposed roads that
never reached completion, and the millions squandered in fighting
proposed roads by every means short of actual bloodshed,--these are
some of the wastes which we have made in our endeavor to create
competition in railway transpo