Excerpt from The Political Aspects of Railroad Regulation: A Criticism of the Eleventh Annual Report of the Interstate Commerce Commission The Eleventh Annual Report of the Interstate Com merce Commission is devoted mainly to the object of inducing Congress to grant to it full rate-making powers and other important administrative functions in the management of traffic over railroads in the United States. This involves a scheme of regulation differing radically from that provided in the Interstate Com merce Act, antagonistic to fundamental principles upon which our governmental system rests, and detrimental to the commercial and industrial interests of this country. In the beginning the Commission repudiated the idea that the Act to Regulate Commerce grants to it any rate-making powers whatsoever. Subsequently, how ever, it conceived the idea that, by implication, the law does give it the power to prescribe rates which shall be observed in the future and proceeded to set the assumed power in motion. This change of opinion and of policy was evolved by degrees. At first the Commission thought it was endowed with the power to prescribe maximum rates, but not minimum rates; next, that it had the power to prescribe both maximum and min imum rates, and finally, that it had the power to pre scribe maximum rates, minimum rates and absolute rates. But the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the cincinnati-chicago Freight Bureau case, delivered May 24, 1897, dispelled that. Fiction. The Commission has for years been in bad humor with the Federal Judiciary and in its eleventh annual report gives vent to its feelings. Now it seeks to gain by legislation that which it has been denied by the courts. Since the year 1890 the Interstate Commerce Com mission has evolved another idea as to its administra tive powers based upon the assumption that under the provisions of the third section of the Act to Regulate Commerce it is endowed with authority to prescribe the rates which shall prevail on railroads in one part of the country with reference to the rates which shall prevail on railroads in other parts of the country. For example, the Commission assumes the power to deter mine the rates from a city in Illinois to a city in Ala bama with reference to the prevailing rates from a city in Massachusetts to a city in Georgia, or to determine the rates on the products of a mine in Michigan with reference to the rates on the products of a mine in Kansas to common points or to different points in the same State or section of the country. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.