Less was said or felt of similar evils in passenger traffic, because the passenger business of the country generally is of much less importance than its freight business, either to the railroad investors or to the producers themselves. But there was the same fluctuation in passenger rates; and there was an outrageous form of discrimination in the development of the free-pass system; a practice which would have fully deserved the name of systematic bribery, had it not become so universal that most men hardly recognized any personal obligation connected with the acceptance of a pass. Officials and other citizens of influence had come to regard it as a right; it was not so much bribery on the part of the companies as blackmail levied against them. The remedies proposed for all these evils have been various. From the very beginning until now there have been some who held that such abuses could be avoided only by State railroad ownership. Such experiments in the United States have not gone far enough to furnish conclusive evidence either way; but the experience of other countries indicates that State railroads, as such, do not avoid these evils. Where they have been worked in competition with other lines, they have been as deeply involved in these abuses as their private competitors--perhaps more so. Where the government has obtained control of all the railroads of the country, and made such arrangements with the water-routes as to render competition impossible, the abuses have vanished, because there was no longer any conceivable motive to continue them. But this was the result of the monopoly, not of the State ownership; and the advantage was purchased by a sacrifice of all the stimulus of competition toward the development of new facilities.