We are heartily in favor of the Hepburn Bill and would be glad to see far stronger regulative measures passed, but nothing more than a moderate palliation of the railway evils under which we suffer must be expected from such legislation. England with her rigid control has not been able to stamp out railroad abuses, and the lesson of English railroad regulation is that the subjecting of private railways to a public control strong enough to accomplish any substantial elimination of discrimination and extortion takes the life out of private railway enterprise along with its evils. Even Germany, with all the power its great government was compelled to exert, could not eliminate unjust discrimination until it nationalized the railways, and so destroyed the root of the evil which lies in the antagonism of interest between the public, on the one hand, and owners of the railways and associated industries on the other. It will be noted that none of the plans suggested proposes to give the Commission any general power to initiate or originate rates, but only the power of fixing a rate in place of one found unjust or unreasonable. So that if the railroads obeyed the law and made no unreasonable rates or unjust discriminations they would still have the whole rate-making power in their own hands and the Commission would have nothing whatever to do with fixing railroad rates. Let us now examine briefly the merits of the leading remedies proposed. _Pooling._ Many railroad men have advocated the legalization of pooling and combination as a remedy for discrimination. A number of railway presidents and managers have told me they believed this would stop discrimination, and that nothing else would. Others have assured me that pooling could not stop discrimination, and even those most emphatic at the start in the opinion that pooling is the needful remedy have admitted on further questioning that pooling would only stop one class of discrimination. Take for example the statement of the president of one of the greatest railroad systems in the country who is a strong advocate of the legalization of pooling. “How do you think unjust discrimination can be stopped?” I asked. “Give the railroads a right to pool,” he said. “Will pooling stop discriminations accorded to business concerns in which the railways or their managers are interested?” “No.” “Will it stop any kind of discrimination except those that grow out of competition among the railroads?” “No, I guess not.” To another railroad man of wide experience in inter-railway contracts, I said: “Can any pool prevent the owners of big concerns in oil, beef, grain, steel, etc., from getting special advantages, or abolish discrimination in the supply of cars, quickness of carriage, division of rates, classification, long and short haul, passes, political favors, and other forms of favoritism originating in causes independent of competition among the railroads?”