All through the Granger contests the railways have weakened the force of their arguments by their misrepresentation of facts and by their extravagant predictions of ruin. The companies were continually proclaiming: 'If this or that is done, it will ruin us; it will ruin the State,' when, in fact, a road cannot be mentioned that has suffered from State legislation. Nineteen years ago no railroad manager could have written what Mr. Stickney writes to-day, and few railroad managers would write to-day what Mr. Mitchell wrote then. And yet, such is the change which public sentiment is undergoing upon these questions, that the utterances of many of our present railroad authors will appear as absurd a few years hence as Mr. Mitchell's letter of nineteen years ago appears to us now. Many railroad attorneys have since been guilty of resorting to the sophistry employed by President Mitchell in that strange letter which he addressed to the Governor of Wisconsin. Even so distinguished a gentleman as Hon. James W. McDill, now a member of the Interstate Commerce Commission, made in 1888, as a member of a railroad lobby, the following remarkable statements before the Railroad Committee of the General Assembly of Iowa, in a speech opposing a proposed reduction of the passenger rate of first-class roads from three to two cents per mile: "The proposition, if confined to the first-class roads of Iowa, proposes a one-third reduction of their revenues from passenger business.... We have earned in Iowa by first-class roads annually about $13,000,000, and a reduction of one cent, or from a rate of three cents to two, will reduce their revenues about $5,000,000 a year.... Thus it is seen that it is proposed to take from the revenues of a part of the railroads of Iowa, annually, almost as much as all the railroads of Iowa have paid for taxes in nine years ($6,549,505.84)."