form advance in freights. But this advance the people have felt was a small enough price to pay for the principle of Federal control of railways; and, as I say, the railway companies have acquiesced.
But, while the situation is just at present satisfactory, and while the railway companies, up to the present time, have been able to "pull through," it is impossible to deny that there is cause for considerable uneasiness, and indeed for considerable positive alarm, in the railway situation. It can not be too often repeated that the enormous mortgage debt of our five hundred American railway companies, averaging some fifteen thousand dollars per mile for some 200,000 miles of railway, being largely held abroad and payable in gold, most intricately and indissolubly controls our national credit. It must not be for a moment forgotten that the payment of the interest on this vast debt or loan is dependent upon the earnings of all this mileage, and that, if the shipper can not pay what the railway earns, this interest can not be paid. It is for these reasons that the subject of a conflicting Federal and State supervision of railways, and of their relations with the people, is of popular interest, and deserves discussion in The Popular Science Monthly, instead of being treated only in financial articles, which only reach the banker, the investor, and the capitalist. Nay, more, the direct interest of the people in the question of a collateral and possibly conflicting State and Federal jurisdiction over railway companies is even more immediate than as above outlined. Indeed, this direct popular interest can be traced into so many channels, each one of them ramifying into so many more, that one quite despairs of exhausting them within the limits of a single paper. Some of the more important of these channels may be, however, briefly indicated:
First, it is directly to the public interest: to the interest of each individual, capitalist, investor, or professional or working man, bread-winner or consumer: that values should fluctuate as little as possible, which is only another way of saying that capital should always be able to find remunerative investment. But (as shown before in these pages) if the capital now locked up in railways is not a remunerative investment, the next step is the railway bankruptcy, the stock-"waterer," and the railway-wrecker. Admitting, then, that the enormous fortunes, the accumulations of vast resources in the hands of one or two individuals which was the constant argument of our Mr. Hudson and his ilk, and always is and always will be the argument of the communist and the anarchist—comes from stock-watering and railway-wrecking, it is the direct popular interest that our railway companies should earn their fixed charges. And to earn their fixed charges they must first, as we have said, earn their operating expenses: and to
