The Railway Library, 1909. Various
either earn it or borrow it, and if it borrows, and borrows judiciously, the rate of interest ought not to be high, but whatever it is, high or low, you pay it. Sometimes people who do not know better think that they are serving a good cause to stick the railway—the company is rich—a personal injury case or something of that kind—but it is a railway and they can afford it—stick them. Now, who pays the bill? Can we charge that up to the construction of a station?
"It is a part of the expense, and the law says that you must pay us for the use of our property enough to pay our expenses and our taxes, and a reasonable return upon the investment, so that all is charged in your bills.
"We had in one thriving city on the Great Northern, I recall, a suit for $20,000. A young brakeman stumbled against a pile of cinders that it was represented the trackmen threw out from between the rails and poured water upon it, and it froze in the winter and was solid, and as he was running alongside of his train he stumbled and fell and was injured—some great injury to the spine that wrecked his entire nervous system, and we inquired and found out how the coal got there, and our experience and education have made us suspicious; we took the cinders to the laboratory and had them analyzed and absolutely they were anthracite, and there never was a ton of anthracite coal burned in a locomotive in the State of Minnesota; we followed it up and we found that the man who brought the suit—a professional suit bringer—had, with a brakeman and his own son, taken the cinders from his own office and piled them there and poured water on them. Now, I speak of that just as an illustration of some applications of that Golden Rule.
COMPARES RAILWAY COST.
"Your future growth will depend on yourselves hereafter, as it has largely depended upon your own efforts in the past. The commerce going to and from the Pacific Coast cities by the sea is being largely carried in foreign bottoms. There was a time when the American nation was a nation of seafaring men, but that does not apply any longer, and I am sorry that that is so. I believe that the people of the United States, I believe that the genius of the country is just as able to carry upon the sea as upon the land. As matters stand today, any bay or inlet where a foreign flag can force its way inland into our country they can call to us to drop the bundle and they take it from us and we can't help ourselves. Now, we ought to be able to help ourselves, for on the land we have so far surpassed the others that there is no comparison.
"In Great Britain their average railway cost is $234,000 per mile. In the United States it is a little less than $60,000 per mile. In Germany it is about $110,000, in France about $140,000, in Austria about the same. Now let us see what they do with their two hundred and thirty-four thousand dollar machine and their one hundred and ten and one hundred and forty. In Great Britain they move an average of five hundred thousand ton miles to the mile of road at a cost of $2.16 for every hundred miles. In Germany they move about seven hundred thousand ton miles at a cost of a trifle under $1.36 for every hundred miles. In France 450,000 ton miles at a cost of $1.40 for every hundred miles. In Austria the cost is $1.50 for moving a ton of freight a hundred miles, and in the United States the cost is 74 cents and a fraction.
AGAINST SHIP SUBSIDY.
"Now we in the United States move the business for less than half the average cost of Europe. We pay from twice to four times the rate of wages, and we do it with an investment of about a third of their average. If we can do that on land, why can't we do it on the sea? I know that if the ships of the United States had the same care and the same opportunity that the ships of other nations have they would do it, and until then no subsidy, no ship subsidy, will ever enable them to compete with other business, because in principle it is wrong to tax all the business of the country—to put your hand into the public treasury and hand out to one particular business a cash subsidy in order that it may live.
"I want to tell you that a steamship line that cannot live without a cash subsidy will make a mighty, mighty lean race with one. It ought to rest on a business foundation. That is the only reason for running ships, because they can be made to pay, and if we can make our railways pay and work at the low rates that the railways in the United States do carry and pay the scale of wages that they do pay, why can't we succeed on the high seas? If we can't, let us hand that business over to somebody who will do it cheaper and better; but I don't feel that the case is a hopeless one, but, on the other hand, I do feel that it would only limit the efforts of those who were trying to make and to build up a merchant marine for the United States; it would only limit their efforts to extend a subsidy to a few ships engaged in the business.
FOREIGNERS GET SUBSIDY.
"I remember on one occasion that I went home from here and there was no tonnage to move the stuff we had to send to the Orient. Absolutely no tonnage was available, and when I got home there was a reception to one of our public men, and the late Senator Mark Hanna was there. I took up in a few remarks the question of a subsidy, and I said. 'If we are going to have one, let us pay a subsidy for something that is going to do us some good. Let us pay a tonnage on the actual products that reach a new market.'
"That would have done some good. The tonnage of the products that does not reach a new market, we wouldn't have anything to pay on that, and on that that does we could afford to pay. Now, we were driven out of the business on the Atlantic, but we might retain a hold upon the business of this ocean. Immediately there was a scheme for Congress for an appropriation, I think of $9,000,000, for ship subsidies, and they found that 80 per cent. of it would go to one line, under the bill that was being then drawn—and that line on the Atlantic Ocean—and I know that the men and most of the officers lived on the other side of the Atlantic, and the stock was owned on the other side of the Atlantic. Now that would not build up a merchant marine for us.
"A company over there has disposed of this old boat to our people and taken what new money they got and built new boats. That was all and that was celebrated—a portion of that was celebrated as the inauguration of a new merchant marine for the United States. Think of it!
"But some of our statesmen were wise enough to believe that it was going to succeed, but it did not. It fell ingloriously. When we have a merchant marine it will be because there is a reason for it. But until that time comes, just put up with the business that we can get, and let the others carry it who can carry it lower and better than we can in this country.
"But bear this in mind: That all your great harbors in the country when compared with the railroad yards sink into insignificance in the tonnage that they move. I think that, in Seattle, I would be safe in saying that twenty tons are moved by rail where one goes by water, unless you can count saw logs. And I had occasion to look up St. Louis. The Mississippi at St. Louis has from eight to twelve feet of water for nearly nine months in the year and boats run in and out of St. Louis, and we are all anxious to make a deep water channel from there to New Orleans.
"Now, in looking up the amount, I found that, notwithstanding they had from eight to twelve feet of water for nine months in the year, or about nine months, less than 1 per cent. of the tonnage that came into St. Louis moved by water; and out of over 1,500,000 tons of coal—and if there is any article among all the shipments that could be moved by water easily and cheaply it would be coal—not one ton of coal moved out of St. Louis by water last year.
"There is a scheme to spend the public money and create a channel fourteen feet deep to the levees at the mouth of the Mississippi, and there are plans to lath and plaster the bottoms of a great many other streams throughout the country, and so many that in order to get any appropriation for an enterprise of great national merit, it is necessary to divide up and load it down with a lot of appropriations. These make what is known as the pork barrel, the river and harbor bill. They load it down with the various enterprises that have no value to anybody, streams on which the government is called to spend more money than all the boats would bring if sold at auction, and in some cases where there have been no boats run for ten years.
LEADS WORLD IN TONNAGE.
"They say they ought to regulate the railroads. Now, when you come to consider the matter practically, I would rather have a railroad alongside of a navigable river, or a river with six or eight or ten feet of water in it, than to have it far away from the river. A box car will beat any ten-foot channel in the world,