e State the right to
regulate rates: "Granting that they [the railroads] must carry freights
for the public in such a way as not to injure either the public or the
freight in the carrying, most emphatically (it seems to me) it does not
follow that they must add to the value of the freights they carry by
charging only such rates as the public or the owners of the freight
insist on."

But Mr. Morgan's indignation rises to the highest pitch in his
discussion of the Interstate Commerce Act. He fears that it will cause
the downfall of our liberties and sees in the background the Venetian
Bridge of Sighs and the French Bastille. He asks: "Why should for any
public reasons--for any reason of public safety--the Interstate Commerce
Law have come to stay?" He then berates the act as follows: "To begin
with, the present act abounds in punishments for and prohibitions
against an industry chartered by the people, but nowhere extends to that
industry a morsel of approval or protection. It bristles with penalties,
legal, equitable, penal, and as for contempt, against railway companies,
but nowhere alludes to any possible case in which a railway company
might, by accident, be in the right, and the patron, customer, passenger
or shipper in the wrong.... The constitutions of civilized nations, for
the last few centuries at least, have provided that not even guilt
should be punished except by due process of law, and have uniformly
refused to set even that due process in motion except upon a complaint
of grievance. But the Interstate Commerce Law denies the one and does
away with the necessity for the other. That statute provides that the
commission it creates shall proceed 'in such manner and by such means as
it shall deem proper,' or 'on its own motion,' and that 'no complaint
shall at any time be dismissed because of the absence of direct damage
to the complainant.' Even the Venetian council often provided for a
certain and described hole in the wall through which the anonymous
bringers of charges should thrust their accusations. Even the court of
star chamber was known to dismiss inquisitions when it found that no
wrong had been done. But the statute of interstate commerce appears to
issue _lettres de cachet_ against anything in the shape of a railway
company--to scatter them broadcast, and to invite any one who happens to
have leisure to fill them out, by inserting the name of a railway
company. It says to the bystander: 'Drop us a po