It cannot be surprising that, under such circumstances, there always has been a tendency among judges to be conservative and to give the railroads the benefit of the doubt in their decisions. Judges well know that railroad companies appeal almost invariably when the decision of a lower court is adverse to them, but private citizens only in exceptional cases. They also know that railroads never forgive adverse decisions, whether right or wrong, while private citizens, as a rule, accept the decision of the court as justice, and do not hold the judge responsible for its being adverse to them. Our judiciary is, and probably always has been, as incorruptible as the judiciary of any country in the world; but our judges are made of no better material than our legislative or executive officers. Weak men, in all stations, are influenced by wealth and power, and weak judges can always be found who will be led or forced from the path of duty so long as corrupt men are permitted to manage railroads and to remain in possession of a power only inferior to that of an autocratic ruler. The influence which railroads exert extends from the lowest to the highest court of the land. Federal courts have more than once been successfully appealed to to give legal sanction to the perpetuation of gigantic frauds, or to frustrate attempts made by the individual States to place restrictions upon roads operated within their respective borders. Twenty years ago a Federal judge aided Mr. Gould in his notorious Erie transactions, and in more recent years a Federal circuit judge in the West threw the property of the Wabash Railroad Company, upon the application of its own directors, into the hands of receivers selected by its former managers without the knowledge or notice of its creditors, and issued orders for the management of the property which greatly discriminated in favor of certain bondholders and were so manifestly unjust that Judge Gresham, before whom the case was subsequently brought, did not hesitate to say to them that "the boldness of this scheme to aid the purchasing committee, by denying equal right to all bondholders secured by the same mortgages, is equaled only by its injustice." At the same time one of the counsel for the dissenting bondholders characterized these strange orders as "the highwayman's clutch on our throat, the robber's demand, 'Your money or your life.'"