Truth About Railways

Mr. Robert P. Porter has a very thougbtful article in the New York Sun oí a recent date in reference to the present unfortuuate position of American railways and in regard to the treatment they now receive from national and state legislatures and the false ideas oí tlie public in reference to them. He is very explicit and altogether correct. We hope that our readers will try to build up in their localities a similar feeling towards railroads to that which we hold toward other large industrial interests. "The latest general balance sheet of the railways of the United States gives us a total valuation of railway property close to twelve thousand millions of dollars and over one hundred and eighty thousand miles of road. Next to our farms, whose value aggregates thirteen thousand millions, these great properties will form, at the close of the century, the most valuable assets of the republic. The capital invested in our manufactures is less than half that invested in railways, and yetthe condition manufactures, if wemayjudgefromof our the frequent tariff agitation.seems to comrnend much more public attention. Die construction of these great systems of transportation has played an important, if not the most important, part in ;he progresa of the nation during the ast half century. By the extensión of these railways population has been disributed, large areas of country have been opened to cultivation, cities built, manufactures established, mines developed, foreign trade increased, and the varied producís of our vast domain jrought frorn tropical and frigid zones to the températe región of densest popilation. In short, the laying of the track and the penetration of the locomotive have kept time with the buildng of the nation itself. "Can the people afford to force an udustry in which neariy one-flfth, or 20 per cent, of the total wealth of the country is invested, to a point where ïearly half the stock and bonds pay nothing in dividends and interest, and he cuirent expenses must be reduced below the safety point? This is the jroblem the people will soon have to ace in relation to our railways. A coniuuation of this sort of thing would imply destroy much of our wealth and rrest the progress of the republic. It s important tliat the people of the Jnited States should realize this situaion. The fact hereiu brought out hould be borne in mind in any discusion of the railway problem, whether or the purpose of state legislation, for ie modificiition of our Interstate Commerce act, or for the purpose of giving dditional employment and more steady -ages to the million that should be directly employed by our raihvays system, and to the additional hundreds of thousands who, under normal conditions, should be kept bnsy in the allied industries. To ignore these facts will work a great injury and place additional abstacles in the way of a return to properity."