I have seen it proposed lately that the Commission should have the power to fix a rate, and that that rate should be final until a final judgment setting it aside was reached. What becomes of the constitution under such a law as that? A railway company, as I have said, owns its property. It renders a compulsory service to the public over its own property, with its own equipment, with its own employes, and at its own risk, and is entitled to a fair compensation, based upon the fair value of the property which it devotes to the public convenience, and the Supreme Court has held that that property can not be taken--because the use of property is the property--can not be taken for the public use without just compensation, and if the state, the legislature, or the Congress may authorize a commission to fix a rate as reasonable and fair, beyond which the railway company may not charge for services it renders, and require it to observe that rate until the final adjudication as to whether the rate is reasonable or not, and after the lapse of months it is decided that it was unreasonable, how can the railway company recover the great sum in unreasonable rates which it had lost? It is a taking of a private property for a public use without just compensation, and I deny the constitutional power of Congress to do that thing. I admit the power, and the exercise of it to the fullest extent to so far regulate railway corporations as to secure to the public a faithful discharge of all their duties to the public at reasonable rates, and under fair regulations; beyond that I believe that the owners of the property ought to be permitted to manage the property. The business of railway management has become one of the learned professions. It calls for some of the brightest intellects in the country. It calls for the exercise of powers which, if devoted to the law or to finance or to any other business, would place those who exercise it among those at the head. It is one of infinite complication, and it is not to be supposed that railway commissions can manage railway properties as well as the men who have been trained from boyhood to that business. I have never questioned that the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Commission in Wisconsin, and other commissions, earnestly set out to do the just and fair thing, but the trouble with this whole question is, and has been through many a year, that it gets too often into politics. I do not believe myself that questions of business ever ought to find their way into the political platform of the party, any more than I believe that the relations of the employer to the employe, whatever the business may be, ought to become the football of party politics.