Speech 62
THE OBJECTS OF RATE REGULATION
REMARKS   ADDRESSED   TO   A   DELEGATION   OF   RAILWAY EMPLOYEES' ORDERS, IN THE EXECUTIVE
OFFICE,    WASHINGTON,    D.     C.,    NOVEMBER     14,

I HAVE just a word that I want to say to you.  In the first place, I trust I need hardly say that no delegation will ever be more welcome at the White House than such a delegation as this.  The interests of the wage worker and the interests of the tiller of the soil must be peculiarly close to all American public men; among other reasons for the reason that if they prosper all other classes will prosper likewise as a matter of course.  As I said the other day to the representatives of organized labor at Atlanta, I shall do everything in my power for the laboring man except to do anything wrong; for the man who will do anything wrong in the nominal interest of another man will also do wrong against this same other man if ever it becomes to his own interest to do so.  Your associations deserve peculiar regard because you have developed to a marked degree the very qualities that all bodies of wage workers should develop: the intelligence, the regard for the future, the self respect mingled with the respect for others, the power of self restraint, which are absolutely essential to any body of men which is to move upward and onward.  Remember always that every man of us must in some shape or other have his passions and appetites governed; and the less of that government there is from within the more there will have to be from without.

With most of the general statements that you make I agree, but I am not sure that I agree with your application of them.  There has been comparatively little complaint to me of the railroad rates being as a whole too high.  The most serious complaints that have been made to me have been of improper discrimination in railroad rates.  For instance, in two recent cases affecting great corporations the complaints that have been made to me have been that they are too low as regards certain big shippers; the complaint in both these cases is about the differential, the difference of treatment of two sets of users of the railways, the difference in favor of one set of shippers as against another set of shippers.  Whether this is just or not I am not prepared to say.  I very deeply appreciate and sympathize with the feeling you express as to the community of interest between the man who actually does the handling of the trains, at the brakes, in the engine cab, as a fireman, as a conductor, and the man who has to do, as a capitalist or as the higher employee of the capitalist, with the general management of the road.  I feel that one of the lessons that can not be over inculcated is the lesson of the identity of interest among our people as a whole.  I do not have to tell a body like this something that I do have to tell some other bodies, and that is if you have not got at the head of a railroad a man who can make a success of it, the wage workers on that railroad can not prosper.  You must have at the head the type of ability which can do well; just as you, comrade of the Civil War [turning to an engineer who wore the button of the Grand Army] needed a general who knew his business, or your valor did not avail.  You remember that the valor of the best enlisted man that ever was (of course he was the basis of everything; the man who carried the gun and made the army; and you could not get the right stuff out of him if it was not in him) was of no value if there was not a directing power to see that the valor was used aright.  The Union Army could have accomplished nothing if the feeling of the enlisted men had been the wish to down Grant and Sherman instead of supporting them heartily in achieving the common work for which all in common were striving.

If you will look at my Raleigh speech and my other recent utterances you will see my principles clearly set forth.  I have said again and again that I would not tolerate for one moment any injustice to a railroad any more than I would tolerate any injustice by a railroad.  I have said again and again that I would remove a public official who improperly yielded to any public clamor against a railroad, no matter how popular that clamor might be, just as quickly as I would remove a public official who rendered ah improper service to the railroad at the expense of the public.  But I am convinced that there must be an increased regulatory and supervisory power exercised by the Government over the railways.  Indeed, I would like it exercised to a much greater extent than I have any idea of pressing at the moment.  For instance, I would greatly like to have it exercised in the matter of overcapitalization.  I am convinced that the “wages fund “would be larger if there was no fictitious capital upon which dividends had to be paid.  I need hardly to say that this does not mean hostility to wealth.  If you gentlemen here, in whom I believe so strongly, were all a unit in demanding that some improper action should be taken against certain men of wealth, then, no matter whether I did or did not like those same men of wealth, I would defend them against you, no matter how much I cared for you; and in so doing I would really be acting in your own interest.  I would be false to your interest if I failed to do justice to the capitalist as much as to the wage worker.  But I shall act against the abuses of wealth just as against all other abuses.  The outcry against rate regulation is of much the same character as that I encountered when I was engaged in putting through that car coupling business; or in endeavoring to secure certain legislation in which you have all been interested, such as the employers' liability law.

Most certainly I will join with you in resisting to the uttermost any movement to hurt or damage any railroads which act decently, for I would hold that such damage was not merely to the capitalist, not merely to the wage worker engaged on the railroads, but to all the country.  My aim is to secure the just and equal treatment of the public by those (I trust and believe a limited number) who do not want to give it, just as much as by the larger number who do want to give it.  All I want in any rate legislation is to give the Government an efficient supervisory power which shall be exercised as scrupulously to prevent injustice to the railroads as to prevent their doing injustice to the public.  Our endeavor is to see that those big railroad men and big shippers who are not responsive to the demands of justice are required to do what their fellows who are responsive to the demands of justice would be glad to do of their own accord.