corporate administration, enabling officials to practice
most injurious and oppressive forms of discrimination, and
is one that neither Federal nor State commission pays much
attention to. With national ownership a sufficiency of cars
would be provided. On many roads the funds that should have
been devoted to furnishing the needed equipment, and which
the corporations contracted to provide when they accepted
their charters, have been divided as construction profits,
or, as in the case of the Santa Fe, Union Pacific, and many
others, diverted to the payment of unearned dividends, while
the public suffers from this failure to comply with charter
obligations.

"There would be such an adjustment of rates that traffic
would take the natural short route, and not, as under
corporate management, be sent around by the way of Robin
Hood's barn, when it might reach its destination by a route
but two-thirds as long, and thus save the unnecessary tax to
which the industries of the country are subjected. That
traffic can be sent by these roundabout routes at the same
or less rates than is charged by the shorter ones is _prima
facie_ evidence that rates are too high.

"There would be a great reduction in the number of men
employed in towns entered by more than one line. For
instance, take a town where there are three or more
railways, and we find three or more full-fledged staffs,
three or more expensive up-town freight and ticket offices,
three or more separate sets of all kinds of officials and
employes, and three or more separate depots and yards to be
maintained. Under Government control these staffs--except in
very large cities--would be reduced to one, and all trains
would run into one centrally located depot; freight and
passengers be transferred without present cost, annoyance
and friction, and public convenience and comfort subserved,
and added to in manner and degree almost inconceivable.

"The great number of expensive attorneys now employed, with
all the attendant corruption with the fountains of justice,
could be dispensed with, and there would be no corporations
to take from the bench the best legal minds, by offering
three or four times the Federal salary....

"Every citizen riding