To the average man this will seem as logical as if the state were to step in and tell him how long he must take to reach his office in the morning or how long he must wear a single pair of shoes. To the railroader the injustice of the thing comes home even more sharply. For these ten years or more he has been working to increase the efficiency of his plant. He has believed that one of the straightest paths to this end has been in increasing the capacity of his trains--just as the carrying capacity of merchant ships has steadily been increased. He has made this possible by enlarging his locomotives and his cars, by laying heavier rails, by rebuilding his bridges and by ironing out the curves and reducing the grades in his tracks, by multiplying the capacity of his yards and terminals--all at great cost. These things have made the 100-car, 5,000-ton capacity freight train not merely a possibility, but to his mind an economic necessity as well. And this despite the interesting opinion of Mr. Harrington Emerson which I have given in an earlier chapter. Last winter, when the state of Illinois seriously considered the legislation limiting train-lengths, the president of one of its greatest railroads went down into the southern part of the state and said: "Do you wish us to discard these strong new locomotives that we have been building? Do you wish us to return to the small engines of a quarter of a century ago? It would be inefficient, wasteful to use our modern locomotives for the short-length trains. And sooner or later you would have to bear the cost of the discarded equipment. State laws may be erratic. Economic laws never are. They are as fixed as the laws of nature or of science." And the state of Illinois took heed of what this man and his fellows said and killed the piece of ridiculous legislation. But it is by no means killed in some of the other states of the Union. * * * * * The conflicts between state authorities that we noticed already have borne directly upon the railroad's earnings. The conflicting intrastate rates have borne far more deeply and far more dangerously upon them. Indiana long since fixed the demurrage penalty at one dollar a day for each car which a railroad failed to furnish a shipper; North Dakota made it two dollars; while Kansas and North Carolina fixed it at five dollars a day. Unscientific is hardly the word for such rate-making. And how shall one term Kansas' action, withholding passenger-fare legislation until she found whether or not the supreme court of Nebraska would permit the two-cent-a-mile bill of that state to stand?