The result is, that the public have lost all confidence in the ability of the pool to regulate competition; and, still worse for the railroads, their managers are losing faith in them also. The great crucial test of this expedient so far as respects the Eastern lines, is likely to come when the number of smaller outside competitors, of the character just alluded to, comes to be increased. The pool will not be likely to admit them into its fold, which already includes too many diverse interests to permit of harmony; and if it did, the danger of disagreements and disruption would be only thereby increased. And yet, if those routes are shut out, they will act as so many free lances, attacking the older lines in every direction, and doing business at rates which will leave the pool companies no alternative but to follow suit. In this dilemma, the outlook for some time ahead is not an encouraging one for the older companies. To my view, it seems very probable that their original sins of construction and their subsequent transgressions of stock “watering” are about to find them out. The natural law of competition is a terrible foe to the violators of commercial justice. It is the inevitable police power of trade. Its working may be evaded for a time; its final conquest over wrongs and monopolies may sometimes be delayed beyond the limits of human patience, and men may at such times lose confidence in its power to right the wrongs of society; but its ultimate success in the restoration of equity and fair-play is as certain as the rising of the sun. My absolute confidence in the ultimate triumph of this principle prompts me to venture the assertion that, _at no very distant period_, the wrongs practised in the original construction of our railroads and in the subsequent “waterings” of their stocks, will be compensated through competition adjusting the profits of the companies to the equivalent of a fair return upon a _true valuation_ of the properties; that is, a value measured by what they are able to earn under the conditions of free competition and the now current cash cost of providing like facilities. That, it appears to me, is the solution towards which our railroad problem is now steadily working; and neither Congressional legislation, nor State regulation, nor the resistance of organized capital, can be expected much longer to stave off that result.