For a year after the enactment of the law its effects were not prominent. Pooling was abolished, but the agreements to maintain rates were still kept up and were fairly observed. But in 1888, the second year of the law's working, it came to be realized that the pool was the vital strength of the agreement to maintain rates, and that this agreement might now be easily broken. Then ensued a remarkable season of rate cutting, which, at the present writing, has reduced many strong companies to the verge of bankruptcy. It is plain enough that if this is allowed to go on, the various stages of receivership, sale, and consolidation will follow in regular order. To avoid this too sudden revolution and the general financial disaster which all sudden revolutions entail, the principal companies in the West are now striving to combine in an association for the maintenance of rates by a plan which will bind them more closely together than any other ever before adopted. Thus to quote Mr. Adams again: "The Interstate Commerce law has given a new impetus to the process of gravitation and consolidation, and it is now going on much more rapidly than ever before. It is at this moment rapidly driving us forward toward some grand railroad-trust scheme." It is a fact which we shall do well to ponder over, that this legislation intended to stimulate competition has finally had just the opposite effect from that which its makers desired. They did increase the intensity of the competition, and have thereby nearly brought about a permanent end to all competition in railway traffic. It must now be clear that the railway is essentially a monopoly, not, be it noted, because of any especial wickedness of its managers or owners, but because competition is _impossible_ as regards the greater part of its business, and because wherever competition is possible, its effect, as the managers well know, would be to annihilate all profits from the operation of the road.