In fact, the railroad had the power to say whether a merchant should or should not succeed in business, whether a town should or should not grow in population and prosperity. In the Hepburn committee’s investigation of the New York railroads in 1879 it was shown that the milling business in certain towns of northern New York had been killed by railroads granting rates which favored Minneapolis and other western points. In one town all the millers but one were obliged to go out of business, and it was elicited in the investigation that this man had a secret contract with the railroad by which they carried his commodity for much lower rates than any of the others. The merchants of New York at that time complained that the discriminations of the railroads against the metropolis were driving away its trade to Baltimore and other points. The nefarious contracts made by the railroads with the Standard Oil Company were discovered so recently as to be still fresh in the public mind. It will be remembered that the railroads not only carried the Standard’s oil for a fraction of that charged a certain individual oil refiner, but actually paid over to the Standard Oil Company the overcharges of which they mulcted the unfortunate individual refiner. The creation of railroad commissions in the various States, and the more recent establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission under the provisions of an act prohibiting these discriminations, forbidding the charging more for a longer than for a shorter haul, and inflicting a severe penalty for making railroad pools, goes far to remedy many of the most glaring evils complained of. But laws after all cannot make men moral, and, as President Charles Francis Adams, of the Union Pacific Railroad, said recently, “one of the chief causes of the railroad troubles is the low standard of commercial honor among railway officials.” The opportunities for personal profit possessed by dishonest railroad officials, while somewhat diminished by the prohibition of discriminating rates by which they were enabled to build up one town in which they had an interest, or to favor certain firms in which they or their friends were partners, have been removed; but the avenues of unlawful gain still open to them are almost innumerable. As Herbert Spencer remarked in dealing with this same subject in England a quarter of a century ago, “corporations have no souls.” A combination of men will stoop to acts which the conscience of no one of them would sanction as an individual act. So, too, a man will deal with the rights and property of a corporation as he would never think of dealing with those of an individual.