in advance could determine all these disputable and competing interests it would be very well. It is not thought that we in Congress can do that.

Now, why do we depart in either of these sections from the wise reservation of the exercise of our power of law-making which characterizes all the other provisions? Is it because a judgment has already been formed among the people, among the great mass of the people, among a considerable portion of the people (for I do not speak disrespectfully in the least of this source and measure of interest), that they have made up their minds, under the pressure of mischiefs which they feel, resentments justly, if you please, that they think should call for redress, and that they have made up their minds that they will, by the General Government, settle two propositions of railroad regulation? If we are to look at that as a bearing and a motive, stimulated by feelings and facts, however important, however just in the minds of the people, not bearing upon the carrying of commerce, but only on the regulation of morality, of justice, of equity, if you please, by the railroads, as distinguished from the question whether these perversions on their part have injured commerce, and as a great interest, they have had their attention drawn to something that it does not belong to the United States Government to redress. It belongs to the law and the general administration of justice and the regulation by the States of what is examinable by them. Here we are to act, not by getting, through a subterfuge, a dominion for the Federal Government of what does not belong to it, but we are to confine ourselves to what we are properly accredited and furnished with, the regulation of commerce.

Let me take now the fourth section. It is not a very bold step. it is not a very assuring step that Congress enters upon this proposition. It does not undertake to say it is right that the lineal measurement shall be the commercial rule of equality. Nobody ventures to say that. What has it said? It has said: We will apply it at least to this, that if the movements of commerce and the interests of commerce impose a rate of transportation for shorter lines, those rules of commerce, those motives, and those interests which should justify and induce a cheapening of the longer transportation shall not be allowed." It is a regula

tion not for cheapening any thing. It is a rule, inflexible so far as Congress imposes it, that nothing shall be cheapened by the laws of trade and the interests of the people. That is a novel proposition to begin with. We are dealing with railroads, dealing with commerce, and we say that cheapening shall not be possible under the circumstances that we state. Is there any denial of that? There are motives and reasons given for it, but nevertheless that is the effect which is to be produced by it.

Is our market to be raised? Is it to be regulated by the shorter hauls included within the lineal transportation of the longer hauls? There are all sorts of long hauls and all sorts of short hauls, the longer long hauls and the shorter short hauls, but lineal measurement shall not be cheapened unless according to lineal measurement, not absolute and universal, but on this line that is drawn. It is one of lineal measurement and nothing else. It is not whether it is up hill or down hill; it is not whether it is on a level; it is not the question whether there is supporting commerce or long gaps of 300 or 500 miles of desert; it does not deal with the question of the whole transportation that the commerce and the people of the United States are interested in transferring from one remote place to another, just as much as in crossing the ocean, where there is no peddling along, as there can be none on the ocean.

Those are all commercial reasons, those are all commercial arguments, those are all reasons which affect cheapness, and this network of reason and freedom and equality is to be subjected to an absolute demarkation, resting upon nothing but lineal distance.

That is a pretty grave responsibility. How do we meet it? First, by limiting it to the same kinds of freight, and under similar circumstances and similar conditions. There are lawsuits enough in that provision to keep us lawyers at work for twenty years on that.

What are freights of the same kind which are to be governed by this lineal demarkation now and forever, unless the law is changed? Let me ask some agriculturist or representative of agriculture. If the rural State of Vermont, where I pass the most of the summer, may be called an agricultural State, let me ask what are freights of the same kind? I will ask my friend from Iowa [Mr. ALLISON] whether oats and corn and wheat are all the same kind of freight?

Mr. ALLISON. They are.

Mr. EVARTS. That is the opinion of that section of the country, and therefore necessarily not only of your own but reinforced by that of your constituents. It is true. In rerum natura it is so. They are products of the soil, they are cereals, and they are food for man and beast.

What does commerce care about that? What is that to commerce? Suppose that in the situation of the commerce of the world which we are to have hereafter and shall have, wheat is competed with abroad under the state of casual crops, already competing with other fertile fields, we are excluded unless we can carry wheat at a cheaper rate than we can carry oats, and do carry oats, and that it is reasonable to carry oats. We are not excluded from Europe in the carrying of oats, and so with corn, but the wheat of India is our rival and our terror. India deals in wheat and not in corn, and not in oats. Russia, in its vast plains and with its abject population, I will say, does not compete with us in It does compete with us in oats and in wheat. Under this rule, in the state of the markets, oats can have the rate thus measured by short hauls and get to Europe, and corn can get there, and wheat can not. What are you going to do about it? What becomes of the lineal rule bearing on commerce? The reasonableness of rates depends upon whether the subject of transportation will bear this or that measure, not an unreasonable measure. That is regulated by the other clauses of the bill; but must we allow India to possess the consumption of Europe, especially England, in wheat, because we can not transport wheat at a cheapness that will comport lineally with the transportation of other articles?

corn.

Commerce has its own laws, its own trade, its own views of equality, equality of reasonableness, equality of promoting commerce, of carrying wheat, and carrying oats, and carrying corn, at rates that are necessary to move them. When commerce, in its vehicles, in its managers, in its capital, is ready to carry wheat across the continent and across the ocean to compete with India, who likes to pass a law saying that it shall not be done because it is a long haul? You can not carry wheat at a cheaper rate when that cheaper rate is the only one that will move it all, because it does not conform to the regularity of the lineal measurements of the short haul.

I have taken these absolutely similar articles as showing the impropriety of substituting the rule of lineal demarkation when the state of the markets is the point which determines whether the rate is reasonable or not.

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But we do not stop there. The Supreme Court of the United States has decided that the States can not regulate long and short hauls, because that would burden interstate commerce; it is a tax. We then undertaking to regulate them, but do we regulate them? We do it sensibly in a general frame; we do it as well as we can if we require an assimilation in their nature of the subjects of transportation; but then look how we draw back, how we really take the position of abdication by the Congress of the United States, the law-making authority, in this demarkation. We will not trust to the laws of trade; we will not trust to the views of managers of railroads and managers of commerce and those interested-not to them, not to all; we will not trust ourselves. We say in this measure, thus condemned by these bodies in different parts of the United States in the interests of commerce for the danger that will come, well, it is very likely it will be so. We are entering into an arrangement of an articulative tissue of commercial interests as extensive as the country and as intricate and manifold as the interests of this vast country are diversified. If these farmers, if these manufacturers, if these merchants condemn us for passing an act that belongs to the law of commerce, only required by law to be made sensible, equal, free, general, we are not going to face the community on that subject. We provide a board to dispense with our folly and to accept regulations that belong to the laws of trade and commerce.

Is that constitutional? Is that what is to come from denying to the States and to their responsibility discrimination, to have five commissioners to make such discriminations as they in their judgment shall think are suitable to the interests of commerce? For that is what it comes to, and just in proportion as this liberality of their discretion and power is restricted it is contrary to the proposition upon which they are trusted. We will not take it, we will not give it wholly to them, but against the accusing laws of trade and commerce, of property, prosperity, equality, and justice, we leave it for each to point to the other, it was the Congress that was at fault; or, on our part, it is the commissioners who did not do their duty. I can not see that that mode of legislation is consonant with the duty of Congressional power and Congressional responsibility.

Mr. President, you will observe that in all the regulative provisions to be supervised and modulated by these commissioners, except in these two clauses, we have given them a guide as clear as is possible, reasonable, just, equal, and a supervision of law to determine what is reasonable, just, and equal. Under the course of commerce developed in Europe or here the words "reasonable, just, and equal" embrace phrases that could be used; and reason, therefore, as far as may be, is adopted as the guide and governor of all these various and competing interests.

Ah, if reason could be supreme, and reason could be omniscient, and reason could be omnipresent and omnipotent, what would be better than to be governed without laws by what was reasonable, and just, and equal?

But there is a practical difficulty in this commission in respect of these undefined powers, in their nature discretionary. Even if we possessed and could possess, and if we should always think so, every measure of equality and justice that can be conceived, such as can be found in the resources of human nature, it takes time for these five men to do justice, not by a dispensing law to repeal the sections but by an examina

tion to be made, judging of each one under its circumstances and not embracing any general propositions.

Besides the burdens of the general framework of the bill which they may discharge, but which will require labor, deliberation, and delay, how long will it be before these five commissioners in dealing with the whole network and the whole area and the whole immeasurable diversity will get around to your constituents and mine? One part of the country will be liberated from this restriction a year and another two years before others. Empowered with all the vigor of the Constitution that may be accredited to it, and with all our confidence in the legislative power of Congress, can we reduce time, and circumstance, and delay, and difficulty? It is said that ten years of agitation have been required to bring these deliberative bodies to the conclusion that we are so near in concurring upon. How long what we find it impossible to settle is it to take these men to settle for the private and particular justice of every neighborhood and every production? There has to be a judicial determination of the particular case. Will they begin with Alabama? I was going to say they will not get down to Alabama, but beginning with Alabama, for aught I know, it will take them about three years before they get to New York. That is not legislation. If it be a demonstration that it is all the legislation we can safely make, then it is regulation that you can not make at all.

Now, about pooling. We have not said so much about pooling. These chambers of commerce have very well pointed out what is the difficulty in the fifth section in making a peremptory, a specific rule on the subject of pooling. There is none of that uncertainty about the regulation that is found in the fourth section, and there is not any suspending power under the fifth section.

What did we do in the original Senate bill? We commit it to this administrative board to examine into the question of pooling and to report to Congress. I thought that was wise. The other House have substituted, in the concurrence of the conference committee, their measure, which is absolute on the subject of pooling.

Pooling is a very general term. It is not in very good repute by itself, and while it carries in this connection, as it does, a combination in the interest of railroads and to oppress commerce, it is regulated by the previous section, and sufficiently. But shall it be said that when by the rules of commerce and the interests of equality, protection against discrimination finds its readiest and its most useful mode in its application to a certain area and operating upon certain interests, from a diversity of points of competition governing and inflaming the zeal and cupidity of competing railroads to reduce rates, are we ready to say that that equalization and a conformity within an area and applicable to competitive roads shall not be allowed if that will produce in the given situation equality and stability?

That pooling, as it is called, does produce uniformity and stability in a certain situation we all know; and we all know that one of the most important interests of shippers, whether Eastern shippers or produce shippers from the West and the South, when they ship under contracts that they make or arrangements with consignees for advances, is to know the rate to be paid, and we have desired to accomplish that by providing that a publication shall be made and that the rates shall not be advanced without due notice. But on one railroad that is literally 20 or 25 miles from another the rate of fare is lowered under the invitation and the rapacious effort of roads either to force a combination or to compel buying out, or which they think they can displace without dishon

est means. So when the shippers take themselves to their contracts they find out that although there is rather a preponderance on one railroad the other is going to go on competing, and it will naturally take shipments from this point at such a rate that although they are lineally further off they are commercially nearer. Who cares in transportation about lineal distances? It is what it costs to bring the produce to the markets. Those are the nearest where the rates are cheapest. Those are the farthest off where the line, as such, is destroyed in its nearness by the excessive charges for freight.

People think that to get rid of the mischief of the competition and the tyranny, if you choose, of the railroads over commerce, the States ought to take all the railroads of the States, and the United States ought to take all the railroads that cross the lines between the States, in order that each line and each interest shall have an equality and uniformity and stability, and that equality and justice may be accomplished. Now what is that going to do? Actually you are displacing competition and making a general income from all the railroads, by pooling, into the Treasury of the United States.

I only insist upon this illustration to the extent that it properly goes. Pooling, which is equalizing matters as to receipts, is in the same nature as equalizing lineally, and is right or wrong, useful or mischievous, according as that unification, that stability, that equality, and that reasonableness is accomplished by one or the other; and though pooling is assumed to be unpopular, and the name may carry a measure of distavor by force of the phrase, and is absolutely worthy of denunciation in all cases, really the effect of pooling, as these chambers of commerce say, is to give reasonable stability and equality. In the experience of the great State of New York they have not only undertaken not to control pooling, but by advisory intimation of the State commission and advisory intervention of the chambers of commerce and of boards of trade at manufacturing centers, as well as at the seaports, they have obtained a rate of transportation that at present meets with very little objection from all the interests in our State. But here the intervention of an authority peremptory, conclusive, and permanent is now proposed.

Mr. President, everything is tending, as everything should tend in this country, to unification and equality in all the intercommunication, the passing of property, of exchange, of commerce in every direction, so that within the periphery of our now vast country there should be no line of discrimination known that the law tolerates, and certainly none that the law defends. We may talk about the mischiefs that have grown out of the exaggeration of wealth and the distribution of wealth under the railroad system; one has been pinched here and one has been inflated there; but I put it to the scope of consideration of the Senate that with all the infirmities, with all the burdens, by whatever phrases they may be described, which the system has caused, progress has gone on in the sense of dispersing population and bringing lands into our fertile and productive system, the commerce ab extra has not been affected injuriously. It has grown and flourished without the aid of intervention, certainly without intervention to constrain. Who shall desire that without investigation we should attempt so vast a disturbance of this equality and these flattering commercial prospects?

Mr. President, to this fortunate land of ours we may apply the description armis potens terra et ubere gleba; our lands in fertility have not been the inferior means by which this nation has been illustrated. It is these fertile plains, and this free intercourse, and this railroad sys