I shall not attempt to cover the whole trust question in twenty minutes. I shall assume that, whether for economic, political, social or moral reasons, you desire some higher power to interfere with the so-called industrial trusts if effective interference be practicable without doing more harm than good; and that you ask me only to express the views of a lawyer, from a legal standpoint, as to what remedies may be available to the Federal Government, which alone is strong enough to grapple with the situation.

True, some lawyers and statesmen of the first rank still argue that all regulation should be left to the states. But they are generally elderly men, whose views became fixed under conditions that are past. No single state is strong enough now. The Constitution does not allow any group of states to form an alliance among themselves. It does not allow them to compete with each other; and too many of them compete for corporation patronage.

I shall assume that you wish me to confine myself to remedies which are direct in their operation. I shall say nothing about the tariff, or about special railroad privileges. You are the experts best qualified to tell whether the trusts that have built themselves up with the help of these advantages are now strong enough to stand without them.

The purpose of this paper is merely to outline without elaboration the questions involved and the principles to be applied in the regulation of railway rates by public authority. If any argument is needed in support of the right and the duty of government control, it is found in an obvious and fundamental fact. Until modern discovery utilized steam as a motive power, the ordinary public road was the sole means of communication by land, the only pathway of internal commerce. Before this new agency was brought into service, while the old highways were yet exclusively employed, the right to their common use was nowhere doubted or denied. In recent times certainly—and this is the point of importance—the established roads, the strips of land set apart as ways of passage, have everywhere been regarded as common property, and the right to their common use has been the recognized and equal possession of every person.

In searching for the trend of railway taxation, it would be an error to assume the existence of a separate and independent system of corporate taxes. This assumption has been frequently made by writers upon American finance, but in so doing they fail to distinguish between the underlying principles of a system of taxation, on the one hand, and the machinery for administering that system, on the other. So far as methods of assessment and collection are concerned, it is true that railway corporations are placed in a class by themselves, but it is not true, speaking generally, that the theory of public contributions applied to them differs from the theory which is applied to other classes of property. That system of taxation known as the general property tax, is as strong to-day as it ever was in the history of our country; indeed it is stronger, if we are to judge from the changes that have taken place in the laws of the states during the past twelve years.