Online Library of Liberty: Economics, vol. 2: Modern Economic Problems

management; but great financial interests have made the railroads the pawns with which they played a game for private riches and personal power. The most important question to be answered is this: how is it going to be possible to preserve the vitalizing force of competition in railroad transportation when competition between carriers has been ended?

The question is paradoxical, but it admits of a valid answer, if the American public has wisdom and political virtue enough to apply it. That answer is: keep politics out of railroad management; preserve and intensify the motives of personal ambition everywhere among the officers and employees of railroads; let merit, not favoritism, determine appointments; let railroad service in all its branches be a technical career in which one who succeeds in any position, on any road, in any part of the country, may hope for recognition and worthy reward anywhere else where there is a bigger job to fill. Railroads as such can no longer compete in rates; it is a question whether they may even continue to compete in service, for that too must tend to become standardized, as well in quality as in price. But only in a figurative sense did railroads ever compete. Railroads are impersonal things; only men compete, only men can have motives that are an essential part of the idea of competition. Under a wise public policy, men ought to continue to compete in railroad work and management; indeed, they might do it more effectively than under the régime of personal and corporation favoritism and of frenzied finance that made such monumental failures of many of the railroads under unregulated private management in the past.

References.

Adams, H. C., American railway accounting. A commentary. Pp. 465. New York State. 1918. By the director of the accounting and statistical work of the I. C. C. from 1887 to 1911.

Brown, H. G., Transportation rates and their regulation. N. Y. Macmillan. 1916.

Johnson, E. R., and Van Metre, T. W., Principles of railroad transportation. Pp. 619. N. Y. Appleton 1916.

McFall, R. J., Railway monopoly and rate regulation. N. Y. Longmans. 1916.

Materials for the study of elementary economics by L. P. Marshall and others. Pp. 627, 628. Univ. of Chic. Press. 1913.

Ripley, W. Z., (Ed.), Railway problems. Bost. Ginn. 1907.

Ripley, W. Z., Railroads: rates and regulations. N. Y. Longmans. 1912.

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