Daily Los Angeles herald., 1882-02-17
some Ra',wsy Truths.

0OaD0 0HbtW"y aEusues
II there has been q really laugh
able hobby in the later railway
history OF the United States It has
clustered around the idea embodied
In the word competition" Every
one whose residence ia California
dates from the Summer OF 1872 re.
the glad refrain which
greeted the arrival on this Coast Of
Col. Thomas A. Scott, who at that
time controlled The Texas Pacific
At last our people, like
Moses OF old, were sitting on Mt.
Pisgsh, and looking down into the
promised land which, by the way,
like Moses, they were never des-
tined to enter, at least not
through Scott's agency. They |
were IS easily exhilarated
40 . rustic who, for the
first time, attends a champagne
supper. They either did not know,
or shut their ears to the accumu-
lating evidence of the fact that
Col. Scott was the most remorse-
less monopolist that ever lived on
the American continent. With all
the howl which has been raised,
from time to time, on this Coast,
against the Central and Southern
Pacific Railways, these corpora.
lions In their most selfish moments,
never knew how to be half as OPP
pressive and exacting as the Penn
sylvsnia Railway, with Tom Scott
at its head, was In the hey-day of
that corporation. Any one who
knew Of the indignation meetings
against the Pennsylvania Central
that were wont to be held at Pitts.
burg could only smile atthe febrile
and foolish extravaganza which
greeted the arrival of Tom Scott in
Southern California. Even before
his honeyed utterances to the peo-
pie OF San Diego had died off his
lips, he had signed secret treaty
with the owners of :. the Southern
Pacific Railway by which he
agreed to buy that road, leaving
San Diego cut in the cold, by the
adoption of the route via the San
G0rgonie Pass. The great panic
OF 1873 left him unable either to
build or buy road; but he showed,
by his treatment of Shreveport,
which had treated him go literally,
just what the people of this Coast
would have got if fortune had
smiled instead of frowning upon
him. He sent cotton from interior
points of Texas to st. Louis, where
qualifications of the Pennsylvania
Central were encountered, cheap
or than to Shreveport, on the
Red river, which was one-third
the distance, and for the reason
that cotton sent to Shreveport
would float down the Mississippi
river to New Orleans, to seek ships
for Europe, instead of taking its
ocean voyage via Philadelphia, un-
der the other system. Had Scott
succeeded in carrying out his
grandiose schemes, the people of
this Coast would have been farther
from the realization Of their hopes
than ever.
The HERALD has always pro-
fessed little faith in a multiplied
tiOn of railways to this Coast re-
sulting in any sensible relief to
and we have founded this
opinion on close observation and
common sense. Wherever rail.
ways are multiplied beyond the
needs Of country, competition
means bankruptcy or combination;
10 any case, combination or alb
sorption. When a people have
to support some half dozen
where only two can
exist with profit, there may be
and transitory eras of
competition and cutting under of
rates, but these are always fol-
lowed by q combination or consol-
idation, whose purpose lie to recov-
or the money lost in fighting, and
an average OF earnings, with the
result that the last state of that
people. In the language OF the
Scriptures, is worse than the first.
Perhaps the most interesting
phase OF the series of articles on
railways which Charles Francis
Adams, Jr., contributed to the At
lantic Monthly, six or seven years
sgo, was that In which he con-
demonstrated that hot
md heavy competition very near
" ruined, as far as railroads could
10 90, two cities so thoroughly es-
lA.. - 4 A. ....~-