merits, or—if we go on as we are going shall we not be forced to admit it?—to the more steadfast types of civilization.
Already the Toryism of Great Britain is looking with admiring gaze to the Democracy of the United States, rapidly establishing, as it is, a privileged and a favored class, and such leaders as Chamberlain and Morley, on the crest of a forward movement, men of office and a great following, forge ahead on the line of equality and freedom such as the latter part of the nineteenth century has brought forward, and give small heed to the teachings and institutions of the United States.
Back of all these facts and postulates is the question, How far is transportation legitimately a subject of government, a branch of government—this as distinguished from being a matter merely of commercial enterprise? We see how easily transportation runs to one head, to one leadership. Competition does not keep this back; we have thoroughly tried the competitive principle, with all the predilections of our people and our Government in its favor, and it has failed; competition has been eliminated; nolens volens, the single leadership is arriving or has arrived. The question, then, is, Is that leadership to be held by a single individual intent on seeking his own fortunes, building up bulwarks of private fortunes around him; breaking down resentment to his bizarre position by travesties of courts, by legislators who smile and smile, and see their way to vote for him, by douceurs to the placable, by dollars at elections, by free rides, by telegraph-franks, by proprietary and subsidized newspapers, by retainers to high-roller lawyers, by political economy manufactured expressly for his benefit, by pillars of society droning of the dangerous tendency of the times, by laissez faire, by audacious self-assertion and robbery, by chameleon politics, by lofty public spirit, by smiles, lies, and entreaties, by the advertising generous hand, by the adulations of intelligence and virtue which millions of dollars so easily command, and—when all else fail—by sordid and brute force pressed home on the weak or galled spot of the body politic or the private interest? This is the commercial side of transportation as presented in the United States in the year of grace 1886. Would it not be well to see what there is in governmental transportation, to pay some attention to the experience of contemned monarchical governments, to cry a halt on the liberty that permits one or a few to absorb the substance of the state; to organize this, or commence it at least, by some of the simple forms of regulation that demand publicity, that ferret out discriminations that mean commercial theft and punish them, that stop vibrations between low and high rates in accordance with the whims of disturbed gall or exultant avarice of transportation rulers, that stop the prior knowledge of a favored few of what is to be, and so deprive them of enormous advantages in trade and transportation?
This is the way, or the most important step, in the limitation of
