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It will go far in foreshadowing the future lines of our social and political growth. Our treatment of “the railroad problem” will show the quality and calibre of our political sense.

These incidents in railroad history show most of the points where we fail, as between man and man, employer and employed, the public and the corporation, the state and the citizen, to maintain the equities of “government”-and employment-“of the people, by the people, for the people.” In the actual physical violence with which railroads have taken their rights of way through more than one American city, and in the railroad strikes of 18 with the anarchy that came with them, there are social disorders we hoped never to see in America.

No other system of taxation has borne as heavily on the people as those extortions and inequalities of railroad charges which caused the granger outburst in the West, and the recent uprising in New York. Violations of trust by Credit Mobiliers, Jay Gould’s wealth and the poverty of Erie stockholders, such corruption of legislatures as gave the Pacific Mail its subsidies, and nicknamed New Jersey “The State of Camden and Amboy,” are sins against the public and private faith on a scale impossible in the early days of republics and corporations.Ī lawsuit still pending, though begun ten years ago by a citizen of Chicago, to recover the value of baggage destroyed by the Pennsylvania Railroad Judge Barnard’s midnight orders for the Erie ring the surrender of its judicial integrity by the supreme court of Pennsylvania at the bidding of the Pennsylvania Railroad, as charged before Congress by President Gowen, of the Reading Railroad the veto by the Standard Oil Company of the enactment of a law by the Pennsylvania legislature to carry out the provision of the constitution of the State that every one should have equal rights on the railroads, - these are a few of the many things that have happened to kill the confidence of our citizens in the laws and the administration of justice. The evasion of almost all taxes by the New York Central Railroad has thrown upon the people of New York State more than a fair share of the cost of government, and illustrates some of the methods by which the rich are making the poor poorer. More than any other class, our railroad men have developed the country, and tried its institutions. The history is not yet finished, but the railroads owe on stocks and bonds $4,600,000,000, more than twice our national debt of $2,220,000,000, and tax the people annually $490,000,000, one and a half times more than the government’s revenue last year of $274,000,000.