railway employes are necessarily the
immediate sufferers....

"A railway party is therefore already in existence.... And
moreover, though accidentally only, it is working forcibly
in behalf of railway interests as a whole....

"Meanwhile Mr. A. F. Walker, the chairman of the Joint
Committee of the Trunk Line and Central Traffic
Associations, prophesies that if things go on as they are
going now, before long 'the managers of the railways will be
chiefly receivers.' In the year 1891 receivers were
appointed for twenty-six companies in the United States,
representing $84,479,000 of capital, and twenty-one
companies, with 3,223 miles of road, with a capitalization
of $186,000,000, were sold under foreclosure.

"It is doubtful whether the result which Mr. Walker
foretells would be regarded as a calamity by the 'uninformed
public opinion of the West.' That Minnesota railroad
commissioner was quite sure of the public applause before he
made his classic declaration that he proposed to 'shake the
railroads over hell' before he had done with them, and the
Governor of Iowa, who announced that he did not care if
'every d--d railroad in the State went into bankruptcy'
before the expiration of his term of office, knew that the
sentiment would have the sympathies of his constituents.
This attitude of the Western mind is, of course, largely
explained by the fact that the people of the West do not as
a rule own railway securities. In two States (the only two
in the West in which, so far as I am aware, the figures have
been compiled) out of 27,645 stockholders in the lines
within the State borders only 359 are residents of the
States. If the other 27,286 were also residents of these
States (that is to say, if 27,286 of the present residents
were also stockholders in the railways), it is probable that
the ferocity of the public opinion in these States against
railways would be materially modified."

It is evident that Mr. Robinson has not been as successful in organizing
small tradesmen, boarding-house keepers, employes and shareholders into
a new party as he contemplated, notwithstanding "it was at no loss for
the sinews of war."

He attempts to show that this movement originated with the employes, but
it is too well known that t