road Transportation." Here it must suffice to say that, after experimenting with every possible system-state railways worked by the state; state railways worked by private companies, now at a fixed rent and again for a share of the profits; private railways, at one time as mere local roads, at another as great systems monopolizing large sections of the country-after trying all these, the Italian government put matters on a permanent basis, six years ago, in accordance with the best results of its practical experience. That basis was as follows: An act was passed by which all, or almost all, of the Italian railways were consolidated in the hands of two companies, which leased their lines from the state for a long term of years, and were left to work them for their own private interest. Each company has access to all the principal centers, such as Milan, Florence, Rome, and Naples; the one, the Adriatico, approaching from the east, the other, the Mediterraneo or Western, following the western coast. When Professor Hadley wrote, five years ago, it was possible only "to look with interest to see how far the event justifies the framers of the bill." To-day it may be pronounced without much hesitation that the result is a success. In spite of all difficulties; in spite of the grinding poverty, not only of the railways, but of the people whom they serve; the Italian lines are steadily, some might say rapidly, improving. Competition has got fairly under way, and in its bracing atmosphere the railway pulse is beginning to beat with something more like express speed. Perhaps the best testimony to the success of the Italian experiment is to be found in the fact that in Holland a similar plan has been quite recently adopted.

One other European country must be noted because of its special interest, in one particular, for American readers. Sweden, like America, has its great lakes, forming, with the aid of the Göta and Trolhäthan canals, a continuous chain of water communication across the country. Stockholm and Gothenburg stand to each other as do Chicago and New York, with Jönköping, Motala, and other towns en route taking the place, on a smaller scale, of Detroit, Buffalo, and the rest of the lake cities. In Sweden, too, the navigation is stopped by ice for some months every year. But here comes in the difference. The Swedish

railways are mainly government property, and it would hardly be dignified for the government to put its rates up or down according as the canals are closed or open. Nor, on the other hand, can it afford to carry all the year round at the price at which the canal boats can work. What happens, therefore, is that the railway rates are permanently maintained at the higher level. In Summer the railways are empty, and the iron ore and the lumber go by water; only in Winter are these products carried by the railways. That the public revenue suffers, is obvious, for, presumably, judging by American experience, some slight profit might be made, even at the canal rates, plus the extra amount that the freighters would be ready to pay for greater dispatch and certainty of delivery; and this profit, whatever it might be, would be available, pro tanto, to reduce the charges on the freight actually carried. Nor, it may also be presumed, would it be against the public interest that the canal carriers should be exposed to the competition of a different carrying agency.

The

In this sketch of the part taken by governments in the control of railway systems, very much, of course, has been left unsaid. Statements have been made which, to those familiar with the subject, may seem to need to be greatly qualified. writer, while endeavoring to be fair, must confess, as his readers will not now need to be told, that he is a convinced individualist; and it is of course possible that his prepossessions have colored his views of the facts. For this every reader must make allowance as he thinks proper. But a word or two of a general nature may perhaps be added here with advantage. In England, American railways are, as a rule, the object of almost unmixed laudation. We see their marvelous cheapness, their flexibility of adaptation to rapidly-changing circumstances, and the extraordinary technical ability with which they are managed. On the other hand, we pay little heed-perhaps because we have a difficulty in imagining them—to the personal preferences, the unjust discriminations, the wild fluctuations of rates, even the actual financial dishonesty, which look so large in the eyes of the American public, and have given to the agitation in favor of more stringent state control, or even of state ownership, whatever force it possesses. It is worth noticing, therefore, that these blots on

the American system have no necessary connection whatever with the system of private management. Rate wars are practically unknown in England. There has been but one in the last nineteen years, and that was between two petty local lines. As for personal discriminations, secret rebates, and the like, the Parliamentary committee on railway rates which sat in 1881 and 1882, and which took many hundreds of pages of evidence from scores of witnesses, most of them hostile to the railways, reported as follows:

"Your committee. . . acquit the railway companies of any grave dereliction of their duty to the public. It is remarkable that no witnesses have appeared to complain of 'preferences' given to individuals by railway companies as acts of private favor or partiality."

If railway officials and railway directors do take advantage of their positions for purposes of nefarious private gain, they are certainly not found out. The present writer cannot remember to have heard of such a case. State ownership, therefore, is not the only method of eradicating these evils.

There are, however, so-called preferences which are not personal, but local; apparent discriminations, that is, in favor of one place against another, such as gave rise to the passage of the famous "long and short haul clause." For these discriminations, founded as they are on the nature of things—and nature is stronger than any government, be it monarchical or be it republican-no state ownership can ever provide a remedy. In Mr. Grierson's book on "Railway Rates" will be found numberless instances in which continental governments are violating the provisions of the long and short haul clause by favoring the foreign exporter or importer above the local consumer. For instance, the rate on coal exported through Hamburg is sixpence per ton less than the local rate. Imported grain from Bremen to Cologne pays 12 shillings, while grain from a way station four miles out of Bremen pays 15 shillings and sixpence. In France, the special rates between Marseilles, Italy, and Switzerland, on the one side, and Havre, Calais, and Dunkirk, on the other, are a constant source of complaint from the representatives of towns along the route. Spanish wine, again, is carried from the frontier to Paris for four centimes, while Bordeaux wine, which goes

only two thirds of the distance, has to pay six centimes. It is quite possible, indeed, that before long these rates will be withdrawn in deference to popular clamor; but that has in great measure happened in England already. The point is that the injury to the local trader, supposing it to be an injury—though all those who have studied the subject are unanimous that it is not-is inflicted just as readily by a government official as by the manager of an ordinary commercial railway.

So much for one side of the shield; now for the reverse. Themistocles, on a famous occasion, was awarded the prize for wisdom and conduct because each commander put down his own name first and that of the great Athenian second. Were the railway experts of the world polled in the same fashion, it can hardly be doubted that the railways of England and the United States would secure the first and second places between them. In speed and accommodation, in the energy which pushes railways into remote districts, and in the skill which creates a traffic where no traffic existed before, they stand to-day in the front rank, as they have stood for the last half century. To say that they are very far from perfect, is nothing; it is only to say that they are worked by human agency. Their worst enemies will scarcely deny that they are at least alive; so long as there is life there may be growth, and we may hope to see them outgrow the faults of their youth. The charge made against state railway systems is that they are incapable of vigorous life. The old adage which proclaimed that "necessity is the mother of invention," has been restated of late years as the law of the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence. If the doctrine is true, the state railway system, relieved from the necessity of struggle, must cease to be fit and will fail to survive. Our children will be able to judge whether the doctrine applies in this case or not, at least if the Anglo-Saxon race in England and America shall retain its hereditary belief in the virtues of private enterprise, and its traditional dislike to government interference. W. M. AcwORTH.

THE RING AND THE TRUST.

I CAME, the other day, in Hegel's "History of Philosophy," upon the following picturesque sentence: "Like Mercury, leader of souls, the idea is in truth the leader of nations and of the world." "The idea"; that is to say, reason, divine and omnipresent, which subdues matter no less than spirit to its final purposes. That sovereign idea it was which Emerson worshiped in his peculiar fashion as "the oversoul." According to the New England teacher, that spirit which is in all men, but which is better and higher than any man, has manifested itself in one chapter of the world's history as freedom, in another as light, in a third as beauty and the gift of artistic expression. And to day, if we seek its lineaments amid the dust and the smoke clouds flung out upon us by the never-resting wheels of machinery, by the bale fires and the great Moloch altars of "the industrial era," we may discern therein three things which are essentially one and the same; I mean science, federation, and fraternity. Science, which affords the indispensable physical basis; federation, in which are summed up the social means and instruments; and fraternity, which combines the beginning with the end, righteousness with love, and all men in that household of which God is the father and king.

Strange as these utterances may sound amid the race for wealth, and under the reign of "the almighty dollar," I believe them to be simply true. The prophets of God see farther than Wall Street does. In its economics it has omitted to reckon with "the Leader of nations and of the world," who is not minded that his work shall end here. He has other destinies in store for man, and he makes of commercial greed on one side, and of the misery thence ensuing on the other, the stepping stones on which we cross to a fresh order of things. By means of these portentous evils, and out of them, he intends the federation of labor and capital to emerge. Of late years his message to this effect has grown