nce.
Thus competition at the great centres will bring rates down everywhere,
and the public will be benefited."

For a year after the enactment of the law its effects were not
prominent. Pooling was abolished, but the agreements to maintain rates
were still kept up and were fairly observed. But in 1888, the second
year of the law's working, it came to be realized that the pool was the
vital strength of the agreement to maintain rates, and that this
agreement might now be easily broken. Then ensued a remarkable season of
rate cutting, which, at the present writing, has reduced many strong
companies to the verge of bankruptcy. It is plain enough that if this is
allowed to go on, the various stages of receivership, sale, and
consolidation will follow in regular order. To avoid this too sudden
revolution and the general financial disaster which all sudden
revolutions entail, the principal companies in the West are now striving
to combine in an association for the maintenance of rates by a plan
which will bind them more closely together than any other ever before
adopted. Thus to quote Mr. Adams again: "The Interstate Commerce law has
given a new impetus to the process of gravitation and consolidation,
and it is now going on much more rapidly than ever before. It is at this
moment rapidly driving us forward toward some grand railroad-trust
scheme."

It is a fact which we shall do well to ponder over, that this
legislation intended to stimulate competition has finally had just the
opposite effect from that which its makers desired. They did increase
the intensity of the competition, and have thereby nearly brought about
a permanent end to all competition in railway traffic.

It must now be clear that the railway is essentially a monopoly, not, be
it noted, because of any especial wickedness of its managers or owners,
but because competition is _impossible_ as regards the greater part of
its business, and because wherever competition is possible, its effect,
as the managers well know, would be to annihilate all profits from the
operation of the road.

Let us consider now some of the evils with which this monopoly is
charged. The first of these is _discrimination_ between persons and
between places. A favored shipper has been enabled to ruin his
competitors because he could obtain special rates, while they, perhaps,
were charged an extra amount. The strong monopolies have in this way
been able to strengthen their hands for