COLLATERAL READINGS SUGGESTED: The Federalist; Spencer's Railway Morals and Railway Policy, in Essays, Scientific, Political, and Speculative; Fiske's The Critical Period in American History; Cooley's Popular and Legal View of Traffic Pooling; Dabneys Public Regulation of Railways; Hudson's The Railway and the Republic; Fink's The Railway Problem and its Solution, Regulation of Interstate Commerce, etc.; Hadley's Railway Transportation; Harper's The Law of Interstate Commerce; Seligman's Railway Tariffs and the Interstate Commerce Law; Reports of the Interstate Commerce Commission. INTERSTATE COMMERCE. BY ROBERT W. TAYLER. FORESEEN AND UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCES OF HUMAN EFFORT. I TOUCH that class of factors in American civilization wherein the hand of man, successfully working with intelligent purpose to predetermined results, has been most conspicuous. Not that what that hand has done is any less the legitimate fruit of man's development, but that it has acted in a more definite manner, with more concrete results. In the development of agencies for our internal commerce, man has wrought with mighty effect upon externals, and, by changing their complexion, has wrought upon himself. It was not always so. The externals upon which the hand of man had not been consciously laid, with any vivid purpose or vital consequence, have always been the potent factors in his development. In the history of the world, from the beginning of time down to the present century, what man has sought to do he has generally failed to do. What he has never dreamed of accomplishing has generally been done. He has been the mere puppet of his environment. He has started out with determined purpose to accomplish certain results, has laid his plans with prudence and with care, has brought to bear all the influences which his foresight had shown him were necessary; he has accomplished something, but that accomplishment has been ingulfed in a vast ocean of other accomplishments of vastly greater consequence and of infinitely more importance. True, man has always been an active agent, endeavoring to do. In earlier times his activities were most positively expressed in his wars of conquest. These were active agencies, undertaken to accomplish positive results. But when the naked and predetermined consequence had been wrought, behold, a thousand other results have sprung into life, and they, and not the intended fact, have wrought upon him and upon his history and career. The invasion of Italy from Germany succeeded in breaking down the Roman civilization, but it did not succeed in accomplishing what the invaders intended. They, no less than the Romans, were swallowed up in the magnitude of their own victories. They were vanquished, no less than those whom they had conquered. And so, if we go down through the centuries that have followed and trace the purpose, we find it, if accomplished at all, of trifling moment as compared with the stupendous results undreamed of that flowed by logical necessity from the facts of history. Even the American rebellion, initiated upon certain narrow lines, developed unconsciously and without predetermination upon lines infinitely broader and more potent than existed at the beginning, and produced results the character and magnitude of which were superlatively greater than were intended by the actors in that great drama. And so I say it has been throughout the history of the human race that the intended consequences, foreseen by man in his advancing progress, bear but slightly upon the fortunes and destinies of the human race as compared with those consequences which came in spite of the conscious efforts of their inspired sources. INTELLIGENT FORESIGHT IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF OUR INTERNAL COMMERCE. Very different has been the philosophy and the history of the development of our internal commerce. As I said a few moments ago, the hand of man has been here laid with more intelligent purpose, with clearer insight of consequence, than in any other field of action in which the human intellect has ever been engaged. Here, indeed, has the hand of man been laid on the face of Nature with a reasonably clear apprehension of the consequences which would flow from it. If it were intended to throw a line of railway into a country as yet unshod by the iron straps, the consequences-social, political, and commercial-which are likely to flow from that adventure can be predicted with more certainty than from any other human effort of like magnitude. Looking, therefore, at the history and development of the means of internal commerce in the United States, we discover the play of forces whose scope and influence could not, perhaps, be accurately predicted at the very beginning of railroad development, but which a few years later could be predicted with reasonable certainty. Their influence upon the social, political, moral, and material affairs of this people are perhaps the most stupendous that any people have experienced since the world began. THE ECONOMIC NATURE OF TRANSPORTATION. Let us start with a proper fundamental conception of transportation. In its essence transportation is waste. It should never be resorted to except in case of necessity. This necessity, to a greater or less extent, always exists, because all the articles which people need are not produced at the spot where needed. To move a thing from one spot to another costs effort. Effort has potential value. If exerted to unnecessarily transport, it is necessarily waste. To move a thing from one spot to another, where there is already a sufficient supply, or where the article can be produced as cheaply as at the place from whence it is moved, is wasteful. In its new situs it is the same article exactly, and has no more value than at its old situs, unless it could not be produced as economically at the new as at the old situs. Therefore the labor of transportation may or may not add to the value of the thing transported, according as it can or can not be produced more cheaply at the place from which it is moved. Therefore the effort in the first instance should be not to multiply the means and possibilities of transportation, but to multiply the means and possibilities of production as near as possible to the seat of consump tion. To haul three thousand miles a thing that can be produced at the place to which it is hauled, with the same effort that is necessary to produce it at the other end of the haul, is waste. This has a bearing upon the value and necessity of transportation and of commerce in its widest as well as in its narrowest sense. It has to do especially with the value and necessity of our foreign commerce; and no foreign commerce, taking this view of the case, can by any possibility be advantageous to us or to any other people if it involves an exchange of the product of one day's labor for the product of one day's labor plus the labor of carriage. We ought always to be making war upon the waste of unnecessary transportation; and that involves, as I have before indicated, the development of the production of those things which can be economically produced-labor cost considered-nearest the seat |