The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1912-02-02

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 | ''The earnings have not fallen off: | they have increased But the operat- | ing expenses have increased also. and out of all proportion to the earnings. | We have to pay great deal more to l our employees than of old. I can't 1 blame the men for wanting more pay, 1 in view of the enormous increase in the cost of living, which pinches them as it does the rest of us. Unluckily, | the adverse conditions are cumula- tive. At the same time that it is costing the employees so much more to i live. popular distrust and commercial uncertainty are reducing the mum Der who can be given steady employment, as well as the capacity of the employ CT to pay them what they ought to have.
 Tt is a serious misfortune when those who have most to say about what shall be done for the regulation of highly, specialized business are. as a rule, persons who have never studied that business from the inside. make a statute fair is to make it Of
 universal application in all details, and to insist that the corporations subject to such statute must treat every community on the same footing instead of following the lines indicat> ed by the natural laws of trade. This is bad mistake. No congress, no state legislature, no political tribun> al. can successfully instruct a railway company, for example, as to the wis est expenditure of its money for the
 
 community is sure that it is best lo> cated for a commercial center, and when popular opinion is allowed to control, or strongly influence, such waste of time, energy, and money than we have seen in connection with the boom towns of the west with the wreck of fortunes in the east as one of the results.
 'sOr, again. if we are going to dis tribute our carrier service on a geo basis. what is to become of those cit ies and towns which owe their pros perity chiefly to the railways, because having been shrewd enough to offer are now reaping the benefit of their foresights? Indeed. if this idea of theoretic equalization is carried far enough. we may yet see whole sec tions of the United States go into pre- mature decline, because other sec tions happen to be better able to en- dure the conditions imposed uniform ly on all railway traffic
 Government Ownership.
 ''AIl these things tend, as it seems to me. in one direction-governmen ownership. There is plenty Of pusi- ness today for the common carriers to do with equal profit to themselves and the general public; but when mat ters shall have reached point where the private owners of railway can no longer make it pay under the terms forced upon it by the government what will be left but Tor the SoNeiI ment to take the property over anu manage it itself? That is a consum- nation we should all deplore, because the enormous patronage which would he controlled by the dominant party l Tvo,1Id present temptations too strong | for ordinary political human nature 1 to resist, and the country would have to pass through another era Of scah> SoIs and abuses and general demor- l afization. Still, we may have il i thrust upon us. which, to my view, l would mean the beginning Of the end of oIIr present form of government.
 s.So I return to my first assertion, l that we must attribute the existing | depression to the suspicious mood 1n- to which the public mind has fallen, l leading to ever greater and greater intrusions of the government into pri- | vate affairs. There is nothing the matter with physical conditions of | business in the United States. What 1 we have to deal with is state Of | mind.''