rtation. And with all our efforts, and
notwithstanding the fact that until within a short time the public
sentiment and the railway managers have been united in the belief that
free competition was the only mode of regulating railroad rates, we are
farther removed from free competition now than ever before.

And now consider in addition to all this the fact that every railway
company must first of all secure from the State a right to exercise the
sovereign power of Eminent Domain, and that it may and does choose and
take every advantage of the favorable locations where its road can be
built most cheaply; which natural highways, mountain passes, and the
like, are gifts of Nature, the right to whose use equitably belongs to
the general public, and not to private parties exclusively. Taking these
facts also into consideration, it seems needless to offer further proof
of the fact that the business of railway transportation is essentially a
monopoly, and that the attempt to regulate it by competition must always
prove a failure in the future, as it always has in the past.

Necessarily we have limited our discussion to the most salient points,
and have not touched at all many of the complicated details of the
railway problem. In a later chapter we can study farther the evils due
to railway monopolies, and the proper remedies therefor. At present we
have accomplished our purpose in finding out the fact that railways are
monopolies, and that they are so by their inherent nature.

Of monopolies in other forms of internal transportation, but little need
be said. Our once busy canals and great rivers seem destined, with the
constant rapid improvement and cheapening in the carriage of goods by
rail, to lose all their former importance. The monopolies small and
great that once held sway there have all vanished before their strong
rival, the railway.

The use of steam in the vessels that navigate the ocean has had an
effect very similar to the replacing of stage-coaches and freight wagons
by the locomotive. Where hundreds of sailing vessels plied their slow
and uncertain trade, steamer lines now make trips only less regular than
the railway itself. The only cause for the existence of a monopoly in
ocean traffic by steam is the greatly increased capital required for a
rival steamship line as compared with that needed for the old sailing
vessels. We find this, the requirement of a large capital, to be a
feature of more or less impor