cultural products have been secured, it is yet true that numerous individuals and communities had suffered grievous injury through unjust discriminations in the charges for railway service.
Unjust discrimination in railway charges being the evil that Congress intended to eradicate by the Interstate Commerce Law, the extent in which that result has been accomplished during the ten years since its enactment must be the measure of its success. If it has not materially diminished the unjust rate-making practices formerly so prevalent it will be fruitless to plead that it has, through the annual reports of the commission appointed for its enforcement, provided several volumes of most valuable and practical discussions of railway problems; that through a clause which has no direct connection with its substance, and might as well have been an independent enactment, it has given desirable impetus to the application of safety appliances to cars and trains; or even that in spite of limitations voluntarily imposed by the commission it has secured the compilation, under the skillful direction of a most accomplished statistician, of a mass of statistical information regarding the business of railway transportation that is of great utility to the student and may become an important factor in securing wise and adequate legislation.
The means that Congress provided for the prevention of unjust discriminations in charges were threefold, viz.:
First, a summary process for hearing and adjudicating complaints and enforcing relief; second, publicity of railway methods and accounts; third, perpetual competition among railways.
Though the tentative character of the law was acknowledged by the most vehement of its partisans, there has been as yet no amendment in any way modifying these fundamental principles. Those that have been passed—adding the penalty of imprisonment to that of a mere tine for violation of its clauses; extending the provisions requiring filing and publicity to rate schedules, in which two or more carriers join; requiring public notice of reductions as well as of advances in charges; and relating to procedure—have been at the direct instance of the commission and were advocated in its reports.
The first remedy lingers a living death in the reports of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and it may yet be resuscitated by suitable legislation, but it was deprived of all practical force, except as a contributor to publicity, when, in the first action brought to secure a decree enforcing an order made by the commission, a Federal court, in a decision that has been followed uniformly ever since, claimed the right to go into the matter at issue between the defendant railway and the complainant before the commission de novo, to hear new testimony if offered, to allow the railway to adopt a new line of defense, and to consider
