"With the Government operating the railways, discriminations would cease, as would individual and local oppression; and we may be sure that an instant and absolute divorce would be decreed between railways and their officials on one side, and commercial enterprises of every name and kind on the other. "The failure to furnish equipment to do the business of the tributary country promptly is one of the greater evils of corporate administration, enabling officials to practice most injurious and oppressive forms of discrimination, and is one that neither Federal nor State commission pays much attention to. With national ownership a sufficiency of cars would be provided. On many roads the funds that should have been devoted to furnishing the needed equipment, and which the corporations contracted to provide when they accepted their charters, have been divided as construction profits, or, as in the case of the Santa Fe, Union Pacific, and many others, diverted to the payment of unearned dividends, while the public suffers from this failure to comply with charter obligations. "There would be such an adjustment of rates that traffic would take the natural short route, and not, as under corporate management, be sent around by the way of Robin Hood's barn, when it might reach its destination by a route but two-thirds as long, and thus save the unnecessary tax to which the industries of the country are subjected. That traffic can be sent by these roundabout routes at the same or less rates than is charged by the shorter ones is _prima facie_ evidence that rates are too high. "There would be a great reduction in the number of men employed in towns entered by more than one line. For instance, take a town where there are three or more railways, and we find three or more full-fledged staffs, three or more expensive up-town freight and ticket offices, three or more separate sets of all kinds of officials and employes, and three or more separate depots and yards to be maintained. Under Government control these staffs--except in very large cities--would be reduced to one, and all trains would run into one centrally located depot; freight and passengers be transferred without present cost, annoyance and friction, and public convenience and comfort subserved, and added to in manner and degree almost inconceivable. "The great number of expensive attorneys now employed, with all the attendant corruption with the fountains of justice, could be dispensed with, and there would be no corporations to take from the bench the best legal minds, by offering three or four times the Federal salary....