Mr. Adams has, from his long association with railroad managers, imbibed one heresy which is in strange discord with the general soundness of his opinions. He holds that the railroad system was left to develop upon a false basis, inasmuch as the American people relied for protecting the community from abuses upon general laws authorizing the freest possible railroad construction everywhere and by any one. It can therefore not be surprising that Mr. Adams is an advocate of the legalized pool. He is of the opinion that secret combinations among railroads, inasmuch as they always have existed, always will exist as long as the railroad system continues as it now is. Hence he proposes to legalize a practice which the law cannot prevent, and by so doing to enable the railroads to confederate themselves in a manner which shall be at once both public and responsible. The reply might be made that there are many other conspiracies which the law cannot always prevent, but that this is no reason why conspiracies should be legalized. If pools and other railroad abuses had, since the beginning of the railroad era, been treated as crimes and misdemeanors, and punished as such by the imposition of heavy fines, few people would to-day be ready to offer apologies for them. If the time shall ever come when pools must be legalized it will be time for railroad control equivalent to Government ownership. Among the more recent writers upon railroad subjects is W. D. Dabney, late chairman of the Committee on Railways and Internal Navigation in the Legislature of Virginia. Mr. Dabney favors State control, and is, on the whole, friendly to the Interstate Commerce Act. He sees danger in the pool, but inclines to the belief that the public benefit derived from the pooling system outweighs the danger of public detriment from its existence. The following is his chief argument for a legalized pool: "Perhaps, so long as railroad companies continue to enjoy an absolute monopoly of transportation over their own lines, so that free competition is restricted in its operation to a comparatively few favored points, it may be worthy of serious consideration whether it would not be better to legalize than to prohibit pooling, taking care to put the whole matter under strict public supervision and control. The companies would then be left comparatively free to bring their local rates into something like harmony with the long-distance rates, and should they fail to do so where the needs of the local community and their revenues make it proper to be done, then it is the function of public regulation to compel it to be done." Of the Interstate Commerce Act Mr. Dabney says: "The legislation recently enacted by Congress for the regulation of commerce by railway is the result of more careful and intelligent deliberation perhaps than any other measure of similar character, and it is not unlikely that the legislation of many of the States will sooner or later be conformed to it."