Argument Before the Committee on Commerce of the House of Representatives; In Opposition to the Pending Bill for the Regulation of Inter-State Commerce (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1882 Excerpt: ... three times as dense as our own, and earning three times as much per mile gross, and nearly four times as much per mile net as our own, at rates averaging about double per mile the rates charged by our railways, and without foreign rail or river rivals or free internal competing and controlling canals, navigable lakes and streams. On the other hand, our Union of forty-seven States and territories covers a continent feeding a world contesting our markets, each State making carrying laws as absolute within its local limits as those of Parliament over all England; our hauls long and complicated, the parallelism of rivers, lakes, and foreign carriers positive and controlling, and our population relatively sparse. Our plea for prior examination seems further fortified by the mere suggestion that even discarding Canadian proximity in so vast a territory as ours the transportation measures proposed in New York may differ in essential particulars from those required in Texas; the question in inland Ohio undeniably has many phases not common to sea-girt California; agricultural Kansas may ask conditions unlike those called for by manufacturing Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania forwarders, with controlling mineral interests, might regard as liberal, laws that in cattle-grazing Wyoming might not be remunerative. Rates only fair in the recently stricken South, and yet more just in the sparse country on the enormously expensive lines of New Mexico, might or would be excessive in the thickly settled and large traffic reservoirs of the North, and so on through the almost infinite complications of our varying geography. It is impossible in a country which possesses our vast geographical area and diverse industries, and more complications produced by lakes, rivers, canals, and...