Speech 49
REGULATION OF RAILWAY RATES
FROM AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT A BANQUET OF THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE AND BOARD OF TRADE, IN DENVER, COLORADO, MAY Q, 1905

GENTLEMEN, I want to say a word as to a governmental policy in which I feel that this whole country ought to take a great interest and which is itself but part of a general policy into which I think our Government must go.  I speak of the policy of extending the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission, of giving them the power to fix rates and to have the rates that they fix go into effect practically at once.  As I say, that represents in my mind part of what should be the general policy of this country, the policy of giving not to the State but to the National Government an increased supervisory and regulatory power over corporations.  The first step and to my mind the most important step in this general policy is to give the Nation in effective form this power over the great transportation corporations of this country.  In the days of the fathers of the older among you the highways of commerce for civilized nations were what they had always been — waterways and roads.  Therefore they were open to all who chose to travel upon them.  Within the last two generations we have seen a system grow up under which the old methods were completely revolutionized, and now the typical highway of commerce is the railroad.  Compared to the railroad the ordinary road for wheeled vehicles, and the waterway, whether natural or artificial, have lost their importance.  Here in Colorado, for instance, it is the railroads which, of course, are the only highways that you need take into account in dealing with the question of commerce in the State or outside of the State.  Therefore, under this changed system, we see highways of commerce grow up each of which is controlled by a single corporation or individual; sometimes several of them being controlled in combination by corporations or a few individuals.  When such is the case, in my judgment it is absolutely necessary that the Nation (for the separate States can not possibly do it) should assume a supervisory and regulatory function over the great corporations which practically control the highways of commerce.

Now fix clearly in your minds two facts at the outset.  As with everything else mundane, when you get that supervisory and regulatory power on behalf of the Nation you will not have cured all the evils that existed and you will not equal the expectations of the amiable but ill regulated enthusiast who thinks that you ought to have cured all those evils.  A measure of good will come, some good will be done, some injustice will have been prevented; but we shall be a long way from the millennium.  Get that fact clear in your mind or you will be laying up for yourselves a store of incalculable disappointment in the future.  That is the first thing.

Now the second and even more important matter: When you give the Nation that power, remember that harm and not good will come unless you give it with the firm determination not only to get justice for yourselves, but to do justice to others.  You must be as jealous to do justice to the railroads as to exact justice from them.  We can not afford in any shape or way in this country to encourage a feeling which would do injustice to a man of property, any more than to submit to injustice from a man of property.  Whether the man owns the biggest railroad or the greatest outside corporation in the land, or whether he makes each day's bread by the sweat of that day's toil, he is entitled to justice and fair dealing, to no more and to no less.  A spirit of envy on the part of those less well off against the better off is as bad as and no worse than a spirit of arrogant disregard for the rights of the man of small means on the part of the man of large means.  The arrogance and the envy are not two different qualities; they are the same quality shown by men under different circumstances.

We must make up our minds that nothing but harm will come from any scheme to exercise such supervision as that I advocate over corporations, and especially over the common carriers, unless we have it clearly fixed in our minds that the scheme is to be one of substantial justice alike to the common carrier and to the public.  If I have the appointment or retention of any commission and power to administer a law of such increased powers I shall neither appoint nor retain the man who would fail to do justice to the railroads any more than I would appoint or retain the man who would fail to exact justice from the railroads.  I want that understood as a preliminary.  If I have the appointment of any of those men, or their retention, they will give a square deal all around or else their shrift will be short.

But with that statement as a preliminary I wish to urge with all the earnestness I possess, not only upon the public, but upon those interested in the great railway corporations, the absolute need of acquiescence in the enactment of such law.  As has been well set forth by the Attorney General, Mr.  Moody, in his recent masterly argument presented to the committee of the Senate which is investigating the matter, the Legislators have the right and as I believe the duty to confer these powers upon some executive body.  It can not confer them upon any court, nor can it take away the court's power to interfere if the law is administered in a way that amounts to confiscation of property.  Of course, it would be possible to come much short of such confiscation and yet do great damage, perhaps irreparable damage, to the great corporations engaged in interstate commerce.  We must remember always that most of the men who are responsible for the management of these great corporations, and who have profited thereby, have made their fortunes not as incidental to damaging, but to benefiting the community as a whole.  We must be careful that nothing is done that would jeopardize their industries and that would therefore work harm of the most far reaching kind not only to all, from the humblest to the highest, engaged in these industries, but to the business community as a whole.  We must be careful to see that the law is administered with sanity and conservatism.  But the power must exist, if justice is to be done as between the public and the common carrier, in some governmental executive tribunal, not only to fix rates and alter them, when convinced that existing rates do injustice, but to see that the rate thus fixed goes into effect practically at once.
I do not ascribe it to any moral culpability of the men engaged in handling these great corporations that they can not see some of the bad effects of certain things they do.  It is most natural for a man who is trying to carry on his business in competition with some other business to think that whatever he does that would beat his competitor is a pretty good thing for the community at large; and often I do not blame him for what he does; but I intend to prevent his doing it when it is against the public weal.

I can not attempt to speak in detail of all that should be put into the law as I hope it will be enacted at the next session of the National Congress.  Not only should this power over rates go in, but in my belief we should at the same time deal with the private car question, which, as regards certain industries, offers an even greater menace than is offered by the present system of fixing rates.  I do not think that the law will have to deal with many subjects, but I do feel that with the two I have mentioned and with perhaps one or two others it should deal effectively.  There will be the argument made on the other side (doubtless the argument being made in their own minds by certain of my hearers) that such power is liable to abuse.  Of course it is.  The power of taxation is liable to grave abuse, and yet it must exist in the appropriate legislative body.  You can not give any needed power to the representatives of the people without exposing yourselves to the danger of that power being abused.  There must be the possibility of abuse or there can not be the possibility of effective use.

In closing I wish to mention one governmental project which I have been instrumental, I think, in having started which will have a certain bearing upon this question, and that is the Panama Canal.  It is perhaps unnecessary for me to say that I am perfectly aware that many most admirable gentlemen disagreed with me in my action toward the Panama Canal.  But I am in a wholly unrepentant frame of mind in reference thereto.  The ethical conception upon which I acted was that I did not intend that Uncle Sam should be held up while he was doing a great work for himself and all mankind.  But without regard to that, when the canal comes into operation I think it will have a very important regulatory effect in connection with the transcontinental commerce of the great railroads.  I think when such is the case those great railroads will have to revise their way of looking at the interests of certain inland cities.

Let me repeat.  I have told you my views as to what I regard to be the most important matter of internal national legislation that in the immediate future will be before this people.  I wish to say again that, important though that legislation is, it is nothing like as important as the spirit in which we approach it.  If we approach it in the spirit of demagogy, if we permit ourselves as a people to be deluded into the belief that permanent good will come to us as a mass, if we attack unjustly the proper rights of others because they are wealthy, we shall do ourselves just as much damage as if we permitted an attack upon those who are poor because they are poor.  In time past republic after republic has existed in this world and has gone down to destruction, sometimes because the republic was turned into a government of the poor who plundered the rich, sometimes because it was turned into a government of the rich who exploited the poor.  It made no difference whatever to the fate of the republic which form its fall took.  That fall was just as certain in one case as in the other.  It was just as certain to follow the triumph of a class which plundered another class, whether the class thus given mastery was the class of the poor who plundered the rich, or the class of the rich who exploited the poor.  The destruction was as inevitable in one instance as in the other.

We have the right to look forward with confident hope to the future of this Republic because it will not and shall not become the Republic of any class, either poor or rich, because it will and shall remain as its founders intended it to be, and as its rescuers under Abraham Lincoln intended it to be, a government where every man, rich or poor, so long as he does his duty to his neighbor, is given his full rights, is guaranteed justice and has justice exacted from him in return.