Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1883-06-25

made TO secure in her interest single con.
troll on consolidated line from tide water
on the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific.
In this crusade against railroad manage
ment, savoring so strongly of communicate
teachings, and which claims to be upon the
eve of a result that will fix one class of
rates upon basis at war with all expert
ence, the changes have been rung, as
Charles Francis Adams puts it, upon
words and phrases that set both argument
and patience at defiance" and, as he adds,
"the currency question itself has hardly
been more completely befogged in clouds
of Indifferent defamation, poor philosophy
and worse logic, and no fallacy has been
too thin to pass current in it" No one has
desired that railroad companies should be
shielded in any wrong-doing. Justice de.
mands that they shall answer for every act
for which the law makes them amenable.
They must be held to the full discharge of
every trust reposed in them, and to the
keeping of every obligation by which they
are bound. But equally justice demands
that truth alone shall be the witness in the
present trial that reason shall supplant
ignorance that the rights sf ownership
and control shall not be ignored; that the
voice of experience shall be heard that
these great interests shall not be turned
over to the caprice and within Of those who
have most to gain by their destruction.
The State has been witness to the spec
tacle of blacksmiths turning out jeweled
earrings; of incompetents tampering with
machinery of the details of which they
have no knowledge. Politicians whose in.
telligerce is to be measured by their own
small ambition have assumed 70 teach the
people on questions of great magnitude and
extreme delicacy, and "to deal correctly
with which," as the Massachusetts Com
missioner states it, requires thorough
knowledge of intricate economical laws,
superadded to a very keen insight into
political habits and modes of thought.
Il has not mattered to them that forty
years OF study of the subject by England
has demonstrated that uniform rates are
impossible, and consolidation Of roads into
through lines desirable. In the feverish
haste of the present, the agitators have
no ear for experience. The evidences
indicate that this fanatical war upon ma
terial interests is to continue some time
yet. Somewhat drunken with their own
wine, the anti.railroad economists now
boldly propose to put into practice, if they
can, the principle of uniformity of freight
rates, which all experience has proven re-
suits in paralysis of those laws of commerce
under which only trade can flourish. By
such system some are made to pay for
thai which they do not receive, and others
receive that for which they do not pay.
But varied solutions of the railroad problem
in California will continue to be advanced
by the metropolitan and the country press :;
the nostrums prescribed will be taken by
the public, perhaps political management
will usurp the place of the wise economy
of experience; people will be antagonized
against the very interests which are most
intimately related to their own, railroads
will be made to suffer, be crippled, har-
raised and annoyed, and their efficiency re.
duced, until new experience re-establishes
old truths, and the masses, cooling from the
fever of an indiscreet campaign against
transportation interests, will pause, posi-
bly, in time to prevent them from being
plunged into the whirlpool of rank com.
rnunisu