Note 346 — Chapter XXX · SUMMARY OF METHODS AND RESULTS.
Reading edition
Mr. Appleton Morgan, writing in the Popular Science Monthly for March, 1887, said (p. 588): “Rebates and discriminations are neither peculiar to railways nor dangerous to the ‘republic.’ They are as necessary and as harmless to the former as is the chromo which the seamstress or the shopgirl gets with her quarter-pound of tea from the small tea-merchant, and no more dangerous to the latter than are the aforesaid chromos to the small recipients.”
General Manager Van Etten of the B. & A. says discrimination is the American principle. You find it everywhere. You buy goods at wholesale much cheaper than you can get them at retail. It is the same with gas and water and electric light.
A number of railroad men take the view that “railroad service” is a commodity to be sold like any other sort of private property at whatever price the owner can get or chooses to take.
The trouble with these statements (aside from the quantity plea which may be allowed within reasonable limits) is that the differences between railway service and ordinary mercantile service are not taken into account.
If people found they were unfairly treated by the bakeries or groceries or shoe stores of a town, it would be easy to establish a new store co-operatively or otherwise, that would be fair and reasonable, and that possibility keeps the store fair as a rule even where there is no direct competition. But when the railways do not deal justly with the people of a town they cannot build a new road to Chicago or San Francisco. It is the monopoly element, together with the vital and all-pervading influence of transportation, that differentiates the railroad service from any ordinary sort of commerce. If bread stores or shoe stores combined, and, by means of control of raw material or transportation facilities, erected a practical monopoly or group of monopolies, and favoritism were shown in the sale of goods by means of which those who were favored by the monopolists got all the chromos and low rates, and grew prosperous and fat, while those who were not favored went chromoless and grew thin in body and emaciated in purse, it is not improbable that the President would write a message on the bread question and the leather question, and a Senate committee would be considering legislation to alleviate the worst evils of the bread and shoe monopolies without stopping the game entirely.