60,000 126 82 18,462,000
C., B. & Q. 77,540,500 140 98 32,567,000
----------- ----------
Total. $225,651,000 $60,815,000"

The table shows that fifty-one million of these sixty million dollars
are the shrinkage of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific and the
Chicago, Burlington and Quincy stocks. It is surprising that Prof.
Hadley should be ignorant of the real causes of this depreciation, which
are known to nearly every Granger in the West. In 1887 the Chicago, Rock
Island and Pacific Railroad Company owned 1,121 miles of road, only 172
of which were outside of the States of Illinois and Iowa. In 1891 the
same company owned 2,725 miles of road, with 1,776 miles outside of
Illinois and Iowa and scattered through Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska,
Colorado, Indian Territory and Oklahoma. In Kansas alone the Rock Island
system grew from two miles in 1887 to 1,059 miles in 1891. In other
words, to a little over a thousand miles of _good_ road the company's
managers added nearly 2,000 miles of poor road and a proportionate
amount of new stock, and the depreciation in the company's stock which
followed was no greater than one should have expected under such
circumstances. The managers of the Rock Island and the promoters of
these new lines found the transactions to their advantage, while the
original stockholders of the company had to bear the imposition, as
hundreds of thousands of railroad stockholders had done before them. But
neither the law of Congress nor that of any State was to blame for this
depreciation of the Rock Island stock.

Since 1891, railroad stocks have advanced on an average at least twenty
per cent., and during the last sixty days have declined about
twenty-five per cent., although there has been no essential change in
interstate or State legislation. It is certainly as fair to call the
advance the ultimate result of restrictive railroad legislation as to
attribute to that legislation the shrinkage above referred to. Extensive
speculations similar to those just mentioned were, during the same
period, indulged in by the managers of the C., B. & Q. Railroad Company
and its protege, the C., B. & N., who, in addition to this, greatly
injured their road in 1888 by the unjust provocation of the engineers'
strike. So destructive were this strike and its consequences to the
company's business