What does the public owe to the railway companies? Precisely, as I view it, the same thing, just and fair treatment. Only that and nothing more. Everybody knows that the railway companies of the United States--I won't put it that way--that the railway system of the United States never could have been created without the utilization of corporate entities. Partnerships never could have concentrated the capital necessary to that end. Only corporations could have achieved it. That was true in the past and it always will be true. Now, why is the railway company different from other corporations, most other corporations? One trouble with the general public is that they don't seem to understand--and they are not perhaps to be chided for it--their relation to the railway company. They think, and they are told, they have been told it in Congress, and they have been told it where one would least have expected it, that railway corporations are public corporations, and they have been taught to believe that their power over public corporations was supreme, which is not far from the truth; but the railway corporation is not a public corporation. The Supreme Court has many times decided that a railway company is a private corporation, that its property is private property, under the protection and safeguards of the Constitution of the United States against the public as well as against individuals who attack it. Then, wherein lies the difference between a private corporation engaged in manufacture and a railway corporation? Right here: A railway corporation can not construct its railway without being clothed with a power which is not given to the usual private corporation, a power which inheres in the sovereignty of the state, the ultimate power of the people delegated to the railway corporations and very few others, and that is the power to take your land without your will at a price fixed not by you but by a jury. Why? Because it is for the public use, and private interest and private sentiment can not be permitted to obstruct the interest of the state, and therefore the property of a railway company while it is private property is, as the Supreme Court of the United States has said, affected with the public interest.