and documents. It authorized the court to punish for contempt in like manner as if they were a court of record. It gave to the decisions and orders of this court the same legal effect as were given to decisions and orders of courts of record. It limited appeals to such cases only which, in the opinion of the commissioners themselves, involve a question of law. The operation of any decision or order made by the commissioners was not to be stayed pending the decision of any such appeal, unless the commissioners so ordered; and excepting in such cases as the commissioners themselves saw fit to certify as cases of law to a higher court, the order of the commissioners was to be deemed final.

The proviso to section 90 of the English "railway clauses act," which I have just read, and which is a clear and comprehensive statement of the English and American common law on the subject, embraces absolutely all the features of the pending bill which I have enumerated as the leading points in it, save and except the clause which prohibits combinations between corporations, but does prohibit these when made "for the purpose of collusively and unfairly creating a monopoly either in the hands of the company or of particular parties."

English railway corporations were not permitted to combine, or as we would term it, to "pool,' except upon the approval and under the supervision of the English Board of Trade, which is a branch of the executive Government of England, the president of the board being a member of the English cabinet. This high governmental authority represented the English public in scanning the purposes, terms, rates, objects, &c., in giving or withholding its approval of a proposed combination. After its approval had been given, if it proved detrimental to the public interests, it could require a revision, and such changes and modifications as were thought necessary for the protection of these interests. In 1873, the powers exercised by the board of trade over this subject were, by act of Parliament, transferred to a board of railway commissioners, where it now resides.

That board can refuse to permit pooling between railroad corporations, or it can permit it upon such terms and conditions as it sees fit in the interest of the English public to impose. In addition, the English railway commission court, always in session with plenary power over the whole subject, is ready at all times promptly and on the spot to hear the complaint of the humblest subject and redress such grievances as he may have against any railroad corporation, and for this purpose is armed with all the ordinary and extraordinary powers with which courts are usually equipped. It may use the process of injunction, mandamus, and execution, and all other remedial process; and it may proceed by fine and imprisonment-in short, may do all on this subject that any other court may do in the exercise of a general jurisdiction.

Thus are the rights of English subjects guarded and protected and the iron hand of the law placed upon the power of great corporations. English law does allow railroad combinations made, but under its own eye, its own supervision, its own dictation, its own regulation, and its own control. This system grew from a small beginning, and has been perfected as time and experience has suggested, as ours will be if we will only commence it by the passage of this bill. The English Government represents the public and stands between the people and corporate rapacity, as the American people have heretofore demanded, and do now demand, that our Government shall do, instead of leaving them, as they are now, absolutely defenceless and without appeal, the prey of the unbridled power of railroad pools and combinations, which destroy all competition while they are unregulated and unrestrained.

What our system of railway regulation may, if commenced now, grow into in the future, whether into one analogous to the English system or

to some other, it is useless now to speculate upon. It is sufficient now to know that the best judgment of those who have been intrusted with its consideration is embodied in the pending bill, and that to leave the question as it now stands without legislation is a greater wrong to the people of this country than could possibly follow the adoption of the bill. The bill is strictly in line with the principles of the common law; that system of laws which, as the Senator from Alabama happily expressed it, "fills this country like the air,” being an embodiment of the culled and selected wisdom of centuries, as it has been evolved from the experience of mankind in the affairs of practical life, and which has been apily eulogized as "the perfection of human wisdom."

I am not apprehensive of error or mistake, nor do I fear that we may wrong either the people or the corporations while adhering with fidelity to the tried and approved principles of the common law, as is done in the pending bill. The supreme court of New York in Hooker rs. Vanderwater (4 Denio, 349), where a number of canal boatmen agreed to put their boats into a pool and divide the earnings according to the number of boats, and not according to the service rendered, held the contract unlawful in an opinion from which I read, as follows:

It is nothing less than the attainment of an exemption of the standard of freights, and the facilities and the accommodations to be rendered to the public, from the wholesome influence of rivalry and competition. To produce that end more completely, each member binds himself not only to run all his present boats according to the agreement and turn their earnings into the common stock, at the rate agreed upon, and at which rate he is to be charged in the final distribution, though he may have received or charged less, but he is also prohibited, under severe penalties, from employing on any other terms boats subsequently acquired. Being thus secure against internal defection and external encroachments, and the members having thrown their concerns into stock, to derive an income in proportion to the number of shares they hold, and not according to their merited activity in business, and safe against the reduction of compensation that would otherwise follow mean accommodations and want of skill and attention, the public must necessarily suffer grievous loss. Indeed the consequences of such a state of things would be that freighters and passengers would be ill-served just in proportion that carriers were well paid.

The pool was pronounced unlawful.

This opinion declares the law as it is now, and has always been throughout the United States,' on poolings and combinations for the purpose of destroying competition by common carriers, and stands unchallenged to-day and is adverted to simply as a sample and specimen of judicial decision on this subject. The decisions of our courts, the books of our standard law writers, and the constitutions and statutes of nearly all the States of the Union declare that the railroads are public highways, that they are common carriers, that they shall not discriminate in freights and charges, that they shall not allow rebates. or drawbacks, that there shall be no pooling or consolidation between parallel or competing lines, and that more shall not be charged for the short than for the long haul of freights.

Twenty-three States of the Union have legislated for the regulation of State commerce, that is, of commerce commencing and ending in the State, but under the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States their legislation whenever it touches commerce which commences in one State or Territory and ends in another, this being interstate commerce, is absolutely null and void, because the regulation of interstate commerce belongs exclusively to the jurisdiction of Congress. The States are not allowed to regulate interstate commerce, and if Congress shall refuse to do so, in what predicament is the country left? For the purpose of illustrating it, I now read from the statement of

Mr. L. E. Chittenden before the House Committee on Commerce on the New York railroad pool. Says Mr. Chittenden :

One word further and I have done. This pool commenced in 1877; it was then a pool contract between the four trunk lines centering in New York. It has grown and stretched out its arms and increased, just as an English judge said such contracts would grow and increase, until now it embraces certainly more than forty-that was the last enumeration I had-of the principal railroads of this country. There is in New York city an equipped and organized pool government. It has its executive committee of the trunk lines; its executive committee of the pool, and another executive commitiee composed of one member from each pooling railroad; it has its board of arbitration, which is intended to take the place of the judiciary; it has its corps of, I do not know how many hundred clerks, an enormous concern, and over it all is the emperor, the commissioner, Mr. Fink, who to-day exercises a power for good or evil over the commerce and products of this country greater not only than that of any of his contemporaries, but greater than any man ever before exerted in the United States of America. He and his imperial organization are as independent of the law as it is possible for man or State to be, and the whole charter or contract which binds these forty roads into this one copartnership and confederation, judged by the principles of the common law, is as unlawful and as much against public policy, if we are to accept the declarations of the judges of the common law, as the Louisiana State lottery or any other similar institution which is confessedly without the pale of the common law.

He was asked the question:

Then why are not the courts open for redress?

Mr. Chittenden says:

They are, but what is the position of a man who undertakes to get redress in these courts? No merchant dares to do it. He can be crushed in his business if he does. The question to-day before this great dry goods trade is, whether or not it is wise, whether they can afford to go into the legal fight and attempt to get these pooling contracts set aside by the courts. No. There is hardly a week passes in the office of any prominent lawyer in New York that this matter is not presented. A merchant comes into the office of his counsel with a claim against a railroad for an overcharge or a denial of some legal right; the lawyer examines it and decides that there is no doubt about the merchant's right to redress. But when it comes to bringing a suit the merchant hesitates--he can not afford to do it. He can not take the risk of doing it, because the railroads have it in their power, at any time, to destroy the business of any man or firm that seeks redress in the courts.

The pool of the poor canal boatmen was broken up by an enforcement of the law. The great railroad pool successfully defies both law and public opinion, is absolute in its power over the commerce of the country, after it has destroyed all competition, and can tax it at pleasure, leaving the public absolutely without appeal and without redress.

I have before me the Drovers' Journal, published in Chicago, in December last, from which I read:

On the 1st of last Match the east-bound pool increased the froight on live stock 40 per cent, and on dressed beef 50 per cent. from Chicago to the scaboard; and by this one act alone they have taken from the pockets of the pro⚫ducers of live stock not thousands but millions of dollars, which has been divided between the six trunk-lines comprising the east-bound pool.

The Chicago Tribune, which I have before me, says of this transaction that the increased rates are a dollar and a quarter a head for all stock transported East "more than the railroad officials thought it necessary to exact through the cold weather of last winter."

The Standard Oil enormity, through which one company is by discrimination and undue preference permitted to monopolize the entire oil trade of this country, bankrupting and destroying all who dare to attempt competition, is familiar to all.

It was proved before the House Committee on Commerce by the confession of leading railroad men that the charges upon the transportation of dry goods from the city of New York are 100 per cent. greater than they should be on a proper classification. I will not trouble the Senate to listen to recitals of the practices of railroad corporations

under the pooling system, because hours could be consumed in that way and a tithe would not be told. I have named these as specimens

of hundreds which are occurring every day. The pooling combination among the roads leaves no competition and the power of the pool becomes absolute.

It can and does discriminate between persons and firms, building up some and destroying others. It builds up some cities and towns, and destroys others. It terrorizes merchants and shippers and traders, who submit quietly to being plundered, because it is in the power of the pool to destroy their business, by advancing their freights and by giving reduced rates to their competitors. They dare not seek redress against the roads over which their freighting is done and with which they deal every day, and upon which they are dependent for the successful prosecution of their business, for there are a thousand ways in which they may be harassed and injured. Under the pooling system there is no uniformity, no stability in rates, so necessary for all legitimate business. The system of rebates and drawbacks, which are secret concessions to favored and preferred shippers, undermines contidence in commercial communities, for no man can tell when his competitors may be thus enabled to undersell him, and subject him to loss in his business.

Without reason, except that the corporations desire more money, and generally when such action cannot be anticipated, rates are advanced, as in the case I have just stated from the Chicago papers. There is but one limit to the power of pooled roads to tax the products of industry in this country; and that limit is found when, to tax higher, will stop production and transportation-how much will a given product bear in the way of tax for transportation and leave a pittance for the producer so as to keep him at work producing? There is no limitation, as things now stand, upon the power of pooled roads to tax the commerce of this country except such as is found in that proposition. There is no redress, no appeal, no remedy, unless Congress acts positively, affirmatively, and energetically.

The railroads are pooled throughout the country North, South, East, and West. There are great pools like that of the more than forty trunk-lines with headquarters in New York, and there are smaller pools like that in Texas, in which I am reliably informed the Houston and Texas Central Railroad and the Texas Pacific road, both in the hauds of receivers appointed by the Federal court, officers of the court, administering and running the roads presumably under the direction of the court, in defiance and contempt of the constitution and laws of Texas, which forbid such combinations, are parties. These pools are operative only where there are competing roads. Their object is to break down and destroy competition. Wherever only one road is found, there is no competition. Then that one road is supreme and may fix its own rates to suit itself. That territory belongs to that road, and is out of the jurisdiction of the pool.

In this connection I will observe that I am informed in a note from the Chief of the Bureau of Statistics that there were on the 1st day of January, 1887, 33.694 railroad stations in the United States, of which 2.778 are junction points, that is, are points where there is more than one railroad, leaving 30,916 stations where there is but one railroad. ing and non-competing points. These tigures will give some idea of the relative proportion of compet

The pool takes care of itself and combines to destroy competition and keep up rates wherever there is competition, but when there is

none it leaves the single road to make its rates as high as it pleases. They are all for the corporations and nothing for the people. Mr. Albert Fink, the head and chief, or president, of the great New York pool, who is generally admitted to be the ablest man in America in railroad affairs, in one of his arguments before the House Committee on Commerce admitted the illegality of pooling, in this language: "The first step to this end (speaking of pooling) should be to legalize the management of railroad property under this plan, and to abandon the antiquated notion that a government or combination, as it is called, of this kind is against public policy."

Of course pooling would not need to be legalized, if it were not now unlawful. Mr. Fink, who is a man of great ability himself, has besides in his employ as head of the great pool over which he presides the finest legal talent in the United States, and always speaks advisedly. Yet there is no clause of the pending bill so bitterly assailed by the railroad people as that which prohibits pooling, admitted by the greatest man among them to be simply declaratory of the common law as it now exists. But the means of enforcing the law, of putting an end to the bold, open defiance of it practiced every day by railroad corporations are provided in the bill. That arouses their most strenuous opposition. The law as it stands now is a dead letter as against the powerful corporations who violate it, though vital and forceful against weaker trespassers like the canal boatmen, and they object to an invocation of the power of the Government for its execution and enforcement upon all alike, the strong and powerful as well as the poor and weak. These people are contending for a vast stake. No greater ever hung upon the chances of human effort. Learned experts estimate the annual commerce of this country at three thousand millions of dollars' worth, three-fourths of which is carried by rail; and three-fourths of that carried by rail is interstate commerce, over which Congress alone has regulating jurisdiction. The Constitution of the United States vests the exclusive power to regulate interstate commerce in Congress. That power is being exercised by railroad pools and combinations, without responsibility to anybody, without restraint from any quarter.

They are fighting with all the appliances and equipments of power, of organized concentrated power, supported by all the aids and influences that can be commanded by unlimited wealth, by all the resources that money can buy, to retain in their hands for their own enrichment, because it includes the power to tax the people of this whole country at their will and pleasure, this power to regulate interstate commerce which the fathers of the Republic denied to the States and intrusted solely to Congress. They are seeking to defeat this bill, as they have defeated all such bills heretofore, because that result will leave them unmolested to handle as they please, and levy such tolls as their avarice may prompt upon twenty billions of dollars' worth of commerce annually.

While this bill is being fought on every clause and section in it, the chief assaults are made upon section 5, which prohibits pooling, and upon what is known as the "long and short haul" clause in section 4. The rule established by this section is that more shall not be charged for the short haul than is charged for the long haul, but a discretion is vested in the commissioners in special cases to relax this rule and allow more to be charged for the short than for the long haul. I confess that I would greatly have preferred the rule established by the section made absolute, and the discretionary proviso left out. This section recog