Furthermore, with the development of business on the great scale, capital had become relatively abundant and cheap, while, on the other hand, labor was becoming relatively expensive and exacting. It was evident that the modern system of industry had passed through its earlier period to one of comparative maturity; and that the problem of wealth production was no longer so exclusively the pressing one, but that the problems of distribution were demanding more attention. How to organize business life on a basis at once stable and efficient; how to see that capital was assured of a normal even though a declining percentage of dividends; while labor should be rewarded according to its capacity and desert,--were problems which took on public rather than private aspects. And when the business world began to face these problems with the consciousness that they were to be met, it had virtually passed over from the lower plane of moral and social responsibility to the higher plane where what the directing minds do or decide is not measured solely by immediate results in money-getting, but also by the test of larger social and public utilities. Although these conditions are not novel ones, and are therefore not difficult to grasp even when stated in general terms, it is still true that the concrete often helps to make the point appear more pertinent. Take then the railroad business as it is now shaping itself, in comparison with its conditions and methods twenty or thirty years ago. The railroads have always existed by virtue of charters which gave them a quasi-public character, and have always been theoretically subject to certain old principles of English common law under which the public or common carrier, like the innkeeper, performs a function not wholly private in its nature. Nevertheless, in its earlier stages the railroad system of this country was in large part constructed and operated by its projectors with no sense whatever of responsibility for their performance of public functions, but with the idea that they were carrying on their own private business in which interference on the part of the public was to be avoided and resented. They fought the railroad codes of State legislatures in the federal courts; they made oppressive rates to give value to new issues of watered stock; they discriminated in favor of one city and against another; by a system of secret rebates they made different terms with every shipper, thus enabling one merchant or manufacturer to destroy his competitor; and they pursued in general a career at least anti-social in its spirit and false and short-sighted in its principles.