The Railroad Question: A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and remedies for their abusesLarrabee, William
History
The Railroad Question: A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and remedies for their abuses
Larrabee, William
Railroads; Railroads -- United States; Railroads and state -- United States
"These pools are the legitimate and necessary results of the
rechartering over and over again of railway companies to transact
business between the same points by paralleling each other. So long as
the people in their legislatures will thus charter parallel lines
serving identical points--thus dividing territory they once granted
entire--it is not exactly clear how they can complain if the lines built
(by money invested, if not on the good faith of the people, at least in
reliance upon an undivided business) combine to save themselves from
bankruptcy." And again: "Against the inequality of their own rates and
the hardship of the long and short haul (in other words, against the
discrimination of nature and of physical laws) no less than against the
peril of bankruptcy and the consequent speculative tendency of their
stocks (after which may come the wrecking, the watering, and the vast
individual fortunes), the railways of this republic have endeavored, by
establishment of pool commissions, to defend both the public and
themselves.... The honest administration of railways for all interests,
the payment of their fixed charges, the solvency of their securities,
the faithful and valuable performance of their duties as carriers, can
be conserved in but one way--by living tariffs, such as the pools once
guaranteed."
In the following passage this author denies to the State the right to
regulate rates: "Granting that they [the railroads] must carry freights
for the public in such a way as not to injure either the public or the
freight in the carrying, most emphatically (it seems to me) it does not
follow that they must add to the value of the freights they carry by
charging only such rates as the public or the owners of the freight
insist on."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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