t predictions of ruin. The companies were continually
proclaiming: 'If this or that is done, it will ruin us; it will ruin the
State,' when, in fact, a road cannot be mentioned that has suffered from
State legislation. Nineteen years ago no railroad manager could have
written what Mr. Stickney writes to-day, and few railroad managers would
write to-day what Mr. Mitchell wrote then. And yet, such is the change
which public sentiment is undergoing upon these questions, that the
utterances of many of our present railroad authors will appear as absurd
a few years hence as Mr. Mitchell's letter of nineteen years ago appears
to us now.

Many railroad attorneys have since been guilty of resorting to the
sophistry employed by President Mitchell in that strange letter which he
addressed to the Governor of Wisconsin. Even so distinguished a
gentleman as Hon. James W. McDill, now a member of the Interstate
Commerce Commission, made in 1888, as a member of a railroad lobby, the
following remarkable statements before the Railroad Committee of the
General Assembly of Iowa, in a speech opposing a proposed reduction of
the passenger rate of first-class roads from three to two cents per
mile:

"The proposition, if confined to the first-class roads of
Iowa, proposes a one-third reduction of their revenues from
passenger business.... We have earned in Iowa by first-class
roads annually about $13,000,000, and a reduction of one
cent, or from a rate of three cents to two, will reduce
their revenues about $5,000,000 a year.... Thus it is seen
that it is proposed to take from the revenues of a part of
the railroads of Iowa, annually, almost as much as all the
railroads of Iowa have paid for taxes in nine years
($6,549,505.84)."

Mr. McDill was a member of the Iowa Railroad Commission for several
years. He may, therefore, be presumed to have known that the State of
Iowa could not, and did not propose to, regulate interstate traffic, and
that the thirteen million dollars railroad revenue to which he referred
was derived both from interstate and State traffic; that the latter was
only about one-fourth of the former, and that therefore the proposed
reduction on the basis of schedule rates would have cut down the net
revenue of the roads only about one million instead of five million
dollars. But Mr. McDill himself states that the average rate earned by
all the railroads of the United