During the last few years systematic efforts have been made by the railroad interests to influence public opinion against the Interstate Commerce Law and restrictive State legislation through the leading magazines of the country. Mr. Sidney Dillon, president of the Union Pacific Railroad, in an article which appeared in the April (1891) number of the _North American Review_, under the title "The West and the Railroads," endeavors to show that the West is indebted to the railroad managers for nearly all of the blessings which its people enjoy, and that therefore railroad legislation in the West is a symptom of rank ingratitude. He prefaces his argument with the remark that the elder portions of our commonwealth have already forgotten, and the younger portions do not comprehend or appreciate, that but for the railroads what we now style the Great West would be, except in the valley of the Mississippi, an unknown and unproductive wilderness. He then argues that, inasmuch as the railroads carry the wheat of Dakota and Minnesota to the sea-coast, and bring those sections of our community into direct relation with hungry and opulent Liverpool, the world should "thank the railway for the opportunity to buy wheat, but none the less should the West thank the railway for the opportunity to sell wheat." It does not seem to occur to Mr. Dillon that the railway might, with equal propriety, thank the world in general, and the Great West in particular, for its opportunity to carry wheat. We are also told that the railway has reclaimed from nature immense tracts of land that were worthless except as to their possibilities, which once seemed too vague and remote to be considered and are to-day valuable; that it has changed the character of the soil as well as the climate of the West, and we are almost given to understand that in many respects it has assumed the functions of Providence. Mr. Dillon generously admits, however, that railways have not been built from philanthropic motives and that we find among railroad promoters and contractors men of large fortunes. He then proceeds to reprimand the States west of the Mississippi for their "ungrateful" legislation, which, he says, interferes with the business of the railway, even to the minutest detail, and always to its detriment. Such legislation exasperates Mr. Dillon the more because it originated in States "which happened to be the communities that owe their birth, existence and prosperity to these very railways." Mr. Dillon then gives vent to his wrath by the use of such terms as impertinence, ignorance and demagogism. He holds that legislative enactments as to the rights and liabilities of railway corporations are useless, "because the common law has long since established these as pertaining to common carriers, and the courts are open to redress all real grievances of the citizen." Upon this theory we might as well dispense with the legislative department of