Not only have the roads been diverse in origin, but the corporations which have constructed them have differed very greatly in respect to their powers and rights, and also to the obligations imposed by law upon them. The early grants of power were charter-contracts, freely given, with very liberal provisions; the public being more anxious that they be accepted and acted upon than distrustful of their abuse afterward. Many of them were not subject to alteration or repeal, except with the consent of the corporators; and some of them contained provisions intended to exclude or limit competition, so that, within a limited territory, something in the nature of a monopoly in transportation would be created. The later grants give evidence of popular apprehension of corporate abuses; the legislature reserves a control over them, and the right to multiply railroads indefinitely is made as free as possible, under the supposition that in this multiplication is to be found the best protection against any one of them abusing its powers. In very many cases the motive to the building of a new road has been antagonism to one already in existence, and municipalities have voted subsidies to the one in the hope that, when constructed, it would draw business away from the other. The anomaly has thus been witnessed of distrust of corporate power being the motive for increasing it; and the multiplication of roads has gone on, without any general supervision or any previous determination by competent public authority that they were needed, until the increase has quite outrun in some sections any proper demand for their facilities. Roads thus brought into existence, without system and under diverse managements, it was soon seen were capable of being so operated that the antagonism of managers, instead of finding expression in legitimate competition, would be given to the sort of strife that can only be properly characterized by calling it, as it commonly is called, a war. From such a war the public inevitably suffers. The best service upon the roads is only performed when they are operated as if they constituted in fact parts of one harmonious system; the rates being made by agreement, and traffic exchanged with as little disturbance as possible, and without abrupt break at the terminals. But when every management might act independently, it sometimes happened that a company made its method of doing business an impediment instead of a help to the business done over other roads, recognizing no public duty which should preclude its doing so, provided a gain to itself, however indirect or illegitimate, was probable. Many consolidations of roads have had for their motive the getting rid of this power to do mischief on the part of roads absorbed.