a majority
of the Senators placed on the Committee on Interstate Commerce were
men whose sympathies were with the railroads.

But even with the personnel of the committee made up against me,
I have thought that had the late President McKinley given me the
active support which he could have given, I could have secured, in
1899, practically all the legislation that was secured six years
later. It is only justice to ex-President Roosevelt to say that
had it not been for his earnest advocacy of railroad rate regulation
the Hepburn Bill would never have been passed. With a chairman of
the Committee on Interstate Commerce well known for his conservatism
on the subject, with a majority of Republicans on the committee in
sympathy with him, without the arousing of public sentiment by
President Roosevelt, nothing would have been done.

I continued to take an exceptionally active part in railroad
regulation until I was placed at the head of the Foreign Relations
Committee of the Senate, and even afterwards I remained as the
ranking member, next to the Chairman, of the Committee on Interstate
Commerce, where I was glad to further as best I could such measures
as came before the Committee in the way of strengthening and giving
force to the original act.

I consented very reluctantly to leave the chairmanship of the
Committee on Interstate Commerce, where I had served during all my
term in the Senate, and I do not believe I would have done so had
it not been for the manner in which the committee was packed against
me in the interest of non-action. At the last it became so that
even the simplest measures which affected the railroads in the
slightest degree would receive adverse action or none at all. I
was utterly disgusted, and on several occasions told prominent
railroad men that if they continued such methods the time would
surely come when the people would become so aroused that they would
see enacted the most drastic of railroad rate laws.

I had much to do with the passage of the Hepburn Act of 1906.
After President Roosevelt had repeatedly urged it in his messages
to Congress, and privately brought influence to bear on Senators,
it seemed pretty certain that public sentiment demanded that
practically the amendments to the original act embodied in Senate
bill 1439, to which I have already referred, would sooner or later
have to be enacted into law. As usual, those opposed to such
legislation demanded that hearings be