Bisbee daily review., 1905-09-24
CHAS A. EDWARDS
 ON RATE LEGISLATION Tells WhyhG Believes Present System Better Than GOV-
 ernmeDt Control
lspecial Correspondenee.l

a good deal worse. Then he gets sore with everybody. There isn't anything very striking in that state ment, but it seems to apply just now to this matter of railroad rate regula- tion that is coming up for discussion again now that the silly season of summer is over. Rate regulation by railroad officers who at least know what they are trying to do seems toI be the poor horse that the public thinks it has at the present time. Gov eTment regulation Of rates by bunch of politicians, who know absolutely nothing about the matter, is the horse they are trying to swap for. think they are going to make mighty bad trade if they ever succeed ID bringing this about.
 l have come to this conclusion after locking over the cards pretty careful y and think on the whole we have got e hand that will pay to stand pat with. One reason foT this con clusion is the recent action of James J. Hill, President of the Great North ern Railroad, and unquesuOnably one of the greatest railroad men of the country, in voluntarily reducing grain rates so that the growers of the grain along the line of his road can put their goods into the market quickly, cheaply and with better advantage 10 them than they ever before had. Jim" Hill is not philaGlhropist. But Jim" Hill is long headed, far seeing, and knows a good thing for his road whenever it shows up. IL was he who said with truth, that it was more beneficial to his railroad to have a half a dozen families settle on its line every week than it was to run crowded excursion trains over the road every day. Of course, that meant that the settler and his crops would pay the road better in the end than the temporary business the excursions would bring. lie is simply applying the same principle in this grain rate business. He knew there was a big market on the other side of the Pa cific for the grain growers of Dakota and Minnesota and fixed rates so they could get at that market in competi- ton with the growers of the Pacific States and the Dominion of Canada It was business, of course, nothing else. It was just the same when be made rate a couple of years ago on Pacific Coast shingles so that Oregon and Washington mills could market their product in th4 middle west in competition with nearby producers.
 Now both these things were done voluntarily and it strikes me it would be a good while before any govern ment railroad rate making commis- sion would ever voluntarily make such a concession to the public. They sim ply would not be allowed to do it.. Other communities which were tenn porarily injured, would step in and make such howl that the whole com mission would run to cover.
 Not even the railroad men deny that there are a whole lot of abuses in this transportation question that have grown up by degrees and which have resulted in illegal benefits to lhe trusts of various kinds. But on the other hand there have been a heap of benefits to the producers, of which these instances of what Mir. Hill has done are good examples. The South has been benefited by voluntary re- auctions of freight rates on cotton, made so that they could ship their product to the Orient. The Jew Englander got the same benefit on his potato crop when there was faIl- ure in the supply of the West anG kc had an overproduction to market. The Boston & Maine Railroad VI unfa- rily lowered it's rates so as to get these potatoes to points where they fn he hGeT f. age. A hundred other instances might be given of similar voluntary concessions by the railroads for the benefit of the agriculturalist or man. ufacturer along the lines. If the Gov ernment was in control of railway rates none of these voluntary conces- sions which were the result of busi- ness emergencies, would have been made. England and Germany have both shown it's impossibilitty in their attempt to manage railway transpor- tatiOn satisfactorily.
 There is a good deal of howl about discriminations in freight rates that has no basis because there are useful determinations that are pernicious, and people invariably forget the for mer and remember the latter. We could not have any of the useful dis criminations-the necessary discrimi- nations-if a railroad commission had control of rates, and all suggested leg islation, in spite of what it's advocates may say, is bound to give tC any com mission absolute power over all rates They can not make Q change in one rate, ip response to a complaint about that rate, without necessitating a change of rates in every community and on every line of railroad that enters into competition in any way with the particular community mak ing the original complaint If thai is not absolute rate fixing don't know what is.
 That's what makes me believe that it is better sometimes to keep the
 horse you have and whose flaiings
 you know all about, than to swaI
 it off for ah animal about which you know nothing about, and which is
 harder to manage than an automobile
 that is determined on a tree climbinf