ss."

Concerning the changes needed to make Government regulation in the
United States more effective, he says:

"A reform which would deal with an elaborate system of evil
cannot, therefore, be confined to treating consequences,
the separate instances of the system. There must be a power
which can go behind these and grapple with causes. There
must, therefore, be something more than a court. There must
be a commission, a department of government which will
provide organized supervision and inspection against which
the quasi-public corporation can claim no privacy as
inviolable. Such a department must be clothed with the power
to ascertain precisely where and how the evils of the
present methods originate, and when these are ascertained it
must be able to apply the remedy at the source of evil. The
remedial force must be of a preventive kind."

A few grave misstatements of historical facts greatly mar Mr. Bonham's
book. He makes, for instance, the following statement:

"Following this came restrictive legislation, which, in some
instances, was so unreasonable as to make any railway
management impossible. Some of the Granger legislation, and
especially that of Iowa, was of this character, as were also
some of the earlier efforts to secure Congressional
legislation."

It was left to Mr. Bonham to discover that legislation ever made
railroad management impossible in Iowa. The General Assembly of Iowa
passed at two different times railroad laws that were greatly obnoxious
to railroad managers. In 1874 it passed a maximum tariff act which, at
the urgent solicitation of the railroad forces, was repealed four years
later; and in 1888 it passed an act containing the principles of the
Interstate Commerce Act and in addition authorizing the Board of
Railroad Commissioners to fix _prima facie_ rates. Strange as it may
seem to Mr. Bonham and other people inclined to believe without
investigation the statements of railroad men, the earnings of the Iowa
roads greatly increased immediately after the enactment of the so-called
Granger laws in 1874, as the following table will show:

Year. Miles of Railroad. Gross Receipts.

1871 2,850 $12,395,826
1872 3,642 14,534,408
1873 3,728 15,430,619
1874 3,765 15,568,907
1875