Experience has shown that the present laws are defective and need amendment. The effort to prohibit all restraint of competition, whether reasonable or unreasonable, is unwise. What we need is to have some administrative body with ample power to forbid combination that is hurtful to the public, and to prevent favoritism to one individual at the expense of another. In other words, we want an administrative body with the power to secure fair and just treatment as among all shippers who use the railroads—and all shippers have a right to use them. We must not leave the enforcement of such a law merely to the Department of Justice; it is out of the question for the law department of the Government to do what should be purely administrative work. The Department of Justice is to stand behind and co-operate with the administrative body, but the administrative body itself must be given the power to do the work and then held to a strict accountability for the exercise of that power. The delays of the law are proverbial, and what we need in this matter is reasonable quickness of action. The abuses of which we have a genuine right to complain take many shapes. Rebates are not now often given openly. But they can be given just as effectively in covert form; and private cars, terminal tracks, and the like must be brought under the control of the commission or administrative body which is to exercise supervision by the Government. But in my judgment the most important thing to do is to give to this administrative body power to make its findings effective, and this can be done only by giving it power, when complaint is made of a given rate as being unjust or unreasonable, if it finds the complaint proper, then itself to fix a maximum rate which it regards as just and reasonable, this rate to go into effect practically at once, that is within a reasonable time, and to stay in effect unless reversed by the courts. I earnestly hope that we shall see a law giving this power passed by Congress. Moreover, I hope that by law power will be conferred upon representatives of the Government capable of performing the duty of public accountants carefully to examine into the books of railroads when so ordered by the Interstate Commerce Commission, which should itself have power to prescribe what books, and what books only, should be kept by railroads. If there is in the minds of the Commission any suspicion that a certain railroad is in any shape or way giving rebates or behaving improperly, I wish the Commission to have power as a matter of right, not as a matter of favor, to make a full and exhaustive investigation of the receipts and expenditures of the railroad, so that any violation or evasion of the law may be detected. This is not a revolutionary proposal on my part, for I only wish the same power given in reference to railroads that is now exercised as a matter of course by the national bank examiners as regards national banks.