Excerpt from Railroads: Rates and Regulation It is this helpless and unorganized general public, always in need of an advocate, which, perhaps, most strongly appeals to the academic mind. If there be lack of judicial poise in this regard, it is, at all events, palliated by free confession in advance. Nor is the history of the assumption by public authority Of its inherent right to control railroads, as narrow an interest as it at first appears. Transportation, as a service, is the commodity produced by common carriers. The manner in which the price of this commodity has been brought under governmental regulation has a direct bearing upon another problem just beginning to open up; namely that of the con trol by the state of the prices of other things. It is not unlikely, in my judgment, that the final solution1 of the so called Trust Problem in the United States, Whether for good or ill, may ultimately contain as one important feature, the determination by governmental authority Of reasonable prices for such prime necessities of life as milk, ice, coal, sugar and Oil, when produced under monopolistic conditions. This view is shared by my colleague Professor Taussig in his Principles of Economics. It is also distinctly set forth by President Van Hise Of the University Of Wisconsin, in his recent Con centration and Control. When the seed Of such an industrial policy is planted, as I believe it possible in time, the soil will have been richly prepared for its reception by our experience in the determination of reasonable charges for the services of railroads and other public utilities. 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.