.

How to organize business life on a basis at once stable and efficient;
how to see that capital was assured of a normal even though a declining
percentage of dividends; while labor should be rewarded according to
its capacity and desert,--were problems which took on public rather
than private aspects. And when the business world began to face these
problems with the consciousness that they were to be met, it had
virtually passed over from the lower plane of moral and social
responsibility to the higher plane where what the directing minds do or
decide is not measured solely by immediate results in money-getting,
but also by the test of larger social and public utilities.

Although these conditions are not novel ones, and are therefore not
difficult to grasp even when stated in general terms, it is still true
that the concrete often helps to make the point appear more pertinent.
Take then the railroad business as it is now shaping itself, in
comparison with its conditions and methods twenty or thirty years ago.
The railroads have always existed by virtue of charters which gave them
a quasi-public character, and have always been theoretically subject to
certain old principles of English common law under which the public or
common carrier, like the innkeeper, performs a function not wholly
private in its nature. Nevertheless, in its earlier stages the railroad
system of this country was in large part constructed and operated by
its projectors with no sense whatever of responsibility for their
performance of public functions, but with the idea that they were
carrying on their own private business in which interference on the
part of the public was to be avoided and resented. They fought the
railroad codes of State legislatures in the federal courts; they made
oppressive rates to give value to new issues of watered stock; they
discriminated in favor of one city and against another; by a system of
secret rebates they made different terms with every shipper, thus
enabling one merchant or manufacturer to destroy his competitor; and
they pursued in general a career at least anti-social in its spirit and
false and short-sighted in its principles.

A profound change--would that it were already complete!--is coming
about in this great field of transportation business. It is perceived
that many of the evils to which I have alluded were incident to the
speculative periods of construction and development in a new country.
The bet