It being settled that the railroads and canals belong of right to the State for the use of the people, and that the corporations who have them in charge are mere agents to run them for the owners, it will surely not be denied that all proper regulations should be made to prevent those agents from betraying their trust. The wisdom is very plain of those provisions in our Constitution which put them on a level with other public servants and forbid them to prostitute their functions for purposes merely mercenary or to engage in any business which necessarily brings their private interests into conflict with their public duty. Seeing the vast magnitude of the affairs intrusted to them, and the terrible temptation to which their cupidity is exposed, it is certainly necessary that you should hold them to their responsibilities, and hold them hard.

But, on the other hand, the corporations deny that they owe any responsibility to the State more than individuals engaged in private business. They assert that the management of the railroads, being a mere speculation of their own, these thoroughfares of trade and travel must be run for their interests, without regard to public right. If they take advantage of their power to oppress the labor and overtax the land of the State; if they crush the industry of one man or place to build up the prosperity of another; if they plunder the rich by extortion, or deepen the distress of the poor by discriminating against them, they justify themselves by showing that all this was in the way of business; that their interest required them to do it; that if they had done otherwise their fortunes would not have been so great as they are; that it was the prudent, proper, and successful method of managing their own affairs. This is their universal answer to all complaints. Their protests against legislative intervention to protect the public always takes this shape, with more or less distinctness of outline. In whatever language they clothe their argument it is the same in substance as that with which Demetrius, the silversmith, defended the sanctity of the temple for which he made shrines: "Sirs, ye know that by this craft we have our wealth."

That railroad corporations and their paid adherents should take this view of the subject is perhaps not surprising, nor does it excite our special wonder to see them supported by the subsidiary rings whom they patronize; but it is amazing to find

that this odious and demoralizing theory has made a strong lodgment in the minds of disinterested, upright, and high-placed men. Two members of the Senate judiciary-I do not say they are the ablest, because comparisons are odious, but they are both of them among the foremost men of the country for talents and integrity-these gentlemen emphatically dissented from me when I asserted that the management of the railroads was not a matter of business to be conducted like a private enterprise merely for the profit of the directors or stockholders. A heresy so supported is entitled to serious refutation, however absurd it may seem on its face.

I aver that a man or corporation appointed to do a public duty must perform it with an eye single to the public interest. If he perverts his authority to purposes of private gain he is guilty of corruption, and all who aid and abet him are his accomplices in crime. He defiles himself if he mingles his own. business with that intrusted to him by the government and uses one to promote the other. If a judge excuse himself for a false decision by saying that he sold his judgment for the highest price he could get, you cover his character with infamy. A ministerial officer, like a sheriff, for instance, who extorts from a defendant, or even from a convict in his custody, what the law does not allow him to collect, and puts the surplus in his pocket, is a knave upon whom you have no mercy. You send county commissioners to the penitentiary for consulting their own financial advantage to the injury of the general weal. When the officers of a city corporation make a business of running it to enrich themselves, at the expense of the public, you can see at a glance that they are the basest of criminals. Why, then, can you not see that the officers of a railway corporation are equally guilty when they pervert the authority with which they are clothed to purposes purely selfish? A railroad corporation is a part of the civil government as much as a city corporation. The officers of the former, as much as the latter, are agents and trustees of the public, and the public has an interest precisely similar in the fidelity of both. Why, then, should partiality or extortion be condemned as criminal in one if it be tolerated as fair business when practiced by the other? Yet there are virtuous and disinterested statesmen among us, who think that faithful service ought not to be enforced against the railroad companies, however loudly it may be claimed by the body of the people as their just

due, and no matter how distinctly it may be commanded by the Constitution itself.

I am able to maintain that all the corruption and misgovernment with which the earth is cursed grows out of this fatal proclivity of public servants to make a business of their duty. Recall the worst cases that have occurred in our history and see if every one of them does not finally resolve itself into that. Tweed and his associates, the Philadelphia rings, the carpet-bag thieves, the Star Route conspirators, all went into business for themselves while pretending to be engaged in the public service. Oakes Ames distributed the stock of the Credit Mobilier where he thought it would "do the most good" to himself and others with whom he was connected, and that was the business in him who gave and in them that took his bribes. Madison Wells, when he proposed to Mr. Kenner that he would make a true return of the election if he could be assured of getting "two hundred thousand dollars apiece for himself and Jim Anderson, and a less sum for the niggers," had as keen an eye to business as if he had been president of a railroad company instead of a returning board. Certain greedy adventurers made it a business to rob the nation of its lands, and, uniting with Congress, carried it on so magnificently, that they got away with an area nearly equal to nine States as large as Pennsylvania. The imposition of the whisky tax, excluding what was held on speculation, was business to the officers and legislators who were sharp enough to anticipate their own votes. You will see on reflection that every base combination which officers have made with one another or with outside parties has been a business arrangement, precisely like that which the railroads justify on the sole ground that it is business. The effect is not only to corrupt those who engage in such transactions, but to demoralize all who are tempted by personal and party attachments to apologize for it.

When the officers of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company corruptly bought the remission of the tonnage tax, and thereby transferred to their own pockets an incalculable sum justly due to the State, it was business, rich to them and profitable beyond the dreams of avarice, while to the swindled taxpayers it was proportionately disastrous. The nine million steal of later date was a business enterprise which failed, because Governor Geary most unexpectedly put his veto upon it. Still more recently the same organization undertook to get from the treasury of the

State four millions of dollars to which it had no decent pretense of a claim. Never was any affair conducted in a more businesslike way. The appointed agents of the corporation came to Harrisburg when the legislature was in session and regularly set up a shop for the purchase of members at prearranged and specified prices. You condemn this piece of business because it was dishonest, but was it more dishonest than that which the same corporation habitually does when it stands on the highway and by fraud or force extorts from individual citizens a much larger sum in excessive tolls, to which its right is no better than to the money it tried to get by bribery?

The functions of railroad corporations are clearly defined and ought to be as universally understood as those of any servant which the State or general government employs. Without proprietary right in the highways, they are appointed to superintend them for the owners. They are charged with the duty of seeing that every needed facility for the use of those thoroughfares shall be furnished to all citizens, like the justice promised in Magna Charta, without sale, denial, or delay. Such services, if faithfully performed, are important and valuable, and the compensation ought to be a full equivalent; accordingly they are authorized to pay themselves, by levying upon all who use the road, a tax, or toll, or freight, sufficient for that purpose.

But this tax must be reasonable, fixed, certain, and uniform, otherwise it is a fraud upon the people, which no department of the State government, nor all of them combined, has power to legalize.

It is much easier to see the nature and character of the mischief wrought by the present practices of the railroad companies than it is to calculate its extent. If your action depends in any degree upon the amount of the spoliation which the people of the State have suffered and are now suffering for want of just laws to protect them, you certainly ought to direct an official inquiry into the subject and ascertain the whole truth as nearly as possible.

But investigations have already taken place in Congress and the legislatures of several States; complaints founded upon specified facts come up from every quarter; verified accusations are made by some of the companies against others; railroad men have openly confessed their fraudulent practices, and sometimes boasted of the large sums they accumulate by them. Putting

these together you can make at least an approximate calculation. I doubt not you will find the sum total of the plunder they have taken in the shape of excessive charges to be frightful. Three or four years ago a committee of the United States Senate collected the materials and made a report upon this general subject, in which they showed that an excess of five cents per hundredweight, charged on the whole agricultural crop of the then current year, would amount to seventy millions of dollars. Upon the crop of the last year it would doubtless come nearer a hundred millions. The railroads would not get this sum, because not nearly all of it is carried, but it would operate as an export tax operates; that is to say, the producer, the consumer, or the intermediate dealer, would lose that amount on the whole crop, carried or not carried. In 1880 the charges from Chicago to the eastern markets were raised from ten cents per hundredweight to thirty-five cents, the latter rate being unquestionably twice as high as a fair one. You can count from these data the terrible loss sustained by the land, labor, and trade of the country. It was the end and the attainment of a combination still subsisting between the great trunk lines, as they are called, to pool their receipts, to stop all competition, to unite the stealing power of all into one grand monopoly and put the whole people at their mercy. It was a criminal conspiracy by the common and statute laws of all the States.

We are often told that in this struggle for honest government against the power of the railroad corporations the just cause has no chance of success. We do seem to be out on a forlorn hope. The little finger of monopoly is thicker than the loins of the law. The influence of our enemies over the legislature is mysterious, incalculable, and strong enough to make the Constitution a dead letter in spite of oaths to obey it, and a popular demand, almost universal, to enforce it. There is no other subject upon which the press is so shy as upon this, the most important of all. Afraid to oppose the corrupt corporations, and ashamed to defend them, it sinks into neutrality. Prudent politicians always want a smooth road to run on, and the right path here is full of impediments. In this state of things we seem weaker than we really are; for the unbroken heart of the people is on the side of justice, equality, and truth. Monopolists may sneer at our blundering leadership and the unorganized condition of our common file, but they had better bethink them that when the worst comes