administered for the profit of the owner exclusively. It is true that
railway companies posed as public agents when demanding the power to
take private property; but when it came to charging for use of their
ways, they claimed to be only private carriers, authorized to bargain as
they pleased. Indeed, it grew to be considered a mark of efficient
railroad management to extract the largest revenue possible from the
people, along the lines of least resistance; that is, by taxing most
heavily those individuals and localities which could least resist. And
the claim by the railroads that they might do this as a matter of right
was long upheld by the courts,[2] nor have the judges even yet, after a
generation of revolt and of legislation, altogether abandoned this
doctrine.

The courts--reluctantly, it is true, and principally at the instigation
of the railways themselves, who found the practice unprofitable--have
latterly discountenanced discrimination as to persons, but they still
uphold discrimination as to localities.[3] Now, among abuses of
sovereign power, this is one of the most galling, for of all taxes the
transportation tax is perhaps that which is most searching, most
insidious, and, when misused, most destructive. The price paid for
transportation is not so essential to the public welfare as its
equality; for neither persons nor localities can prosper when the
necessaries of life cost them more than they cost their competitors. In
towns, no cup of water can be drunk, no crust of bread eaten, no garment
worn, which has not paid the transportation tax, and the farmer's crops
must rot upon his land, if other farmers pay enough less than he to
exclude him from markets toward which they all stand in a position
otherwise equal. Yet this formidable power has been usurped by private
persons who have used it purely selfishly, as no legitimate sovereign
could have used it, and by persons who have indignantly denounced all