way management seems to be the smallest is Germany, and the reasons for this have already been shown. Nevertheless, Professor Hugo R. Meyer, in his book entitled Government Regulation of Railway Rates, published some years ago, demonstrated with the greatest copiousness of illustration that while partisan politics does not affect railway management in Germany, the adjustments of rates are largely determined by sectional struggles and, as a result, are ill-adapted to commercial and industrial needs.

On the whole, it seems to me looking at the matter as an American citizen rather than as an American railway man that the argument against government ownership of railways in this country is overwhelmingly conclusive. The evidence that I have cited (and much more of the same kind could be introduced) indicates that public ownership would tend to increase rather than to reduce the cost of operation; that it would tend to make rates more inelastic and thereby injure commerce; that it would lead to efforts by the political parties to use the railways and their employees for political purposes, which would result in the railways and politics mutually corrupting each other.

But I realize that political action is often not determined by the statement and analysis of facts, and that our future railway policy may not be so determined. It is unfortunately true that the managements of our railways, by various mistakes of both omission and commission, have lost the confidence of the public; that many leaders of public thought, from motives sometimes good and sometimes otherwise, have fanned the popular feeling against them; that in consequence a system of regulation which unduly interferes with management and limits profits has been adopted; and that this

combination of circumstances may hurry us into government ownership unless some alternative plan be adopted to prevent it.

Some acute observers who have detected the drift of things have advocated different plans to secure satisfactory results under private ownership for both stockholders and public, and at the same time save us from government ownership. One scheme that has been suggested is that the railways be allowed so to adjust their rates that each can earn a fair return, say 6 or 7 per cent, on a fair valuation, and that all earnings in excess of this be divided between the railway company and the public, the public's share being paid into the government treasuries as

taxes.

This plan has marked advantages over that of limiting all railways to the same maximum return. If every railway, whether well or ill managed, were restricted to the same return, there would be no incentive to good management, while allowing the better conducted roads to earn and pay dividends substantially exceeding the average would give an incentive to good management of all railways. The adoption of this scheme might tend to keep up rates, because each reduction in them would reduce the public's, as well as the railway's, share of the net earnings, but I cannot agree that shippers and travelers are entitled to receive in the form of reductions in rates all the benefit of increases in the efficiency of railway operation.

Another plan that has been outlined and advocated with ability by W. W. Cook, the eminent authority on the law of corporations, is that there shall be organized by the federal government a great holding company, on whose stock the government would guarantee a return of three per cent, and which would acquire a controlling

part, or all, of the securities of all the railways. The first board of directors would be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate of the United States, and its members would appoint their own successors. Mr. Cook contends that this scheme would have many advantages over either the present policy of private ownership and government regulation, or government ownership. It would, he says, remove the railways from the influence of Wall Street without subjecting them to such political influences as probably would dominate them under government ownership. He assumes that the directors of the holding company would retain the present officers of the various lines, who have been chosen because of their experience and skill in railway affairs, and that, therefore, the roads would be as efficiently managed as they are now, and would be more efficiently managed than if government ownership were adopted and they were turned over to political appointees.

It seems probable that the first, and almost certain that the succeeding, directors of the proposed holding company would be chosen for political reasons, and that they would be influenced by like considerations in appointing the officers of the railways. Furthermore, the concentration of the control of all of the railways in the United States in the hands of a single holding company would cause a concentration upon it of the demands of all interests and sections for readjustments of passenger rates, freight rates, and wages, and for the provision of additional facilities and the construction of new lines, which the holding company would be unable to meet; and the resulting public dissatisfaction probably would soon lead to the substitution of government ownership.

A short time ago I suggested that it might be desirable for the government

to acquire from twenty-five to forty per cent of the stock of the railways, with proper representation on each board of directors, so that it would become the partner of the present owners, sharing in their profits, and also in their losses, if any. This plan would have the advantage of causing government officials to look at the railway business from the standpoint of the owner as well as from that of the traveler, the shipper, and the wage-earner.

Under present conditions there is a strong tendency for public officials to regard themselves as the champions of all other classes, against the owners; and therefore, in spite of all the railway managers can do, wages and the other expenses of operation increase faster than gross earnings; net earnings are so small as to offer insufficient attraction to investors; the new facilities provided in recent years have been inadequate; and it is certain that any large and sudden increase of traffic will find the railways unable to cope with it. If the government were a stockholder and had representatives on the boards of directors, whatever affected net earnings would affect the stock of the government as well as that of private individuals, and the public, and public authorities, would be better able to appreciate the railways' financial needs than they are now.

Undoubtedly the best course will be to leave the ownership of the railways entirely in private hands and follow a policy of firm but wise regulation. We have not succeeded yet in working out and adopting such a policy. Most of the legislation for the regulation of railways has been conceived in prejudice, or drafted in ignorance. It used to be contended that certain forms of government regulation must be adopted as alternatives to government ownership. It is to be

feared that they may prove to be precursors and causes of, rather than alternatives to, government ownership. But if the public and public men will but give the subject the intelligent, fair, serious consideration it demands, the fatal plunge into public ownership may be avoided.

Fair and intelligent consideration would result in the concentration of authority over the railways in the hands of the Interstate Commerce Commission and the abolition or subordination to the Interstate Commission of the numerous state commissions, with their multitudinous, conflicting, vexatious, and costly requirements. It would result in the appointment of well-paid experts and scientists, both to membership on the commissions, and to the various important and responsible positions under them. It would result in public authorities ceasing to try to substitute themselves for the managers of the railways, and becoming content to perform their proper duty of holding the managers responsible for the effects of their management on the public interests. It would result in no diminution of the efforts, growing every day more successful, to suppress all forms of unfair dis

crimination by railways; but it would result in a diminution of the incessant I and successful efforts to hold down railway profits efforts which are repelling capital from the railway business, and, by preventing adequate increases of facilities, imperiling the welfare of every manufacturer, every merchant, every farmer, every wageearner, in the country. One thing is certain, and that is that we cannot long continue to muddle along as we are doing now. W. M. Acworth, the eminent English authority on railway affairs, after a visit to this country, said in an article published last autumn in the Bulletin of the International Railway Congress:—

'If I have an individual belief it is that the United States will get much nearer to the brink of nationalization than they have come at present, and will then start back on the edge of the precipice, and escape by some road not yet discernible.'

The best road by which we may es cape is a conservative, wise, just policy of regulation; and the most vital question of our time is whether the people of the United States will be just, wise, and conservative enough to take that road.

"If you see to the inscription over my grave,' Norton once wrote to Lowell, 'you need only say, "He had good friends, whom he loved." At an earlier day Lowell had written to Norton: 'It is almost my happiest thought that with all the drawbacks of temperament (of which no one is more conscious than myself) I have never lost a friend. For I would rather be loved than anything else in this world.'

The touches of sentiment through the long and abundant correspondence between Lowell and Norton are highly characteristic of the two men, and reveal an affectionate relation maintained without an interruption through a close friendship of more than forty years. Inheriting many things in common from their New England forbears of that straitest sect from which the frank expression of warm feeling is not usually expected, they found themselves similarly possessed of this somewhat exotic gift, endearing them to many friends - and to each other.

But there were many other bonds of intimate association - a Cambridge boyhood with the same background of learning and simple dignity that dwelt in such places as Elmwood and Shady Hill; a love of letters naturally born of such surroundings; an enthusiasm for the forward movements in political, social, and intellectual life; a joint participation in editorial labors-first on the new Atlantic, with Lowell as editor and Norton as one of the earliest con

tributors, then as fellow editors of the older North American Review. In later years a parallel experience as professors at Harvard, an enduring sympathy of aim, bound them together when Lowell went out into the larger world as a public servant, and Norton remained at Cambridge, a confidant and counsellor in all that concerned the truest service of their country and the finer civilization which both the friends held dearly at heart.

Norton, the younger of the two, led, moreover, so essentially domestic a life from beginning to end that his friends were almost inevitably the friends of his family; and in no instance was this more strikingly exemplified than in the friendship with Lowell, the friend of three generations at Shady Hill. It is, therefore, natural that in any record of Norton's life his letters to Lowell should bear an uncommon significance. The passages drawn here from letters covering a wide range of years illustrate many points in their community of interests.

The letters begin in the fifties, when the Nortons were spending the summer in a house they had recently built at Newport, where Lowell often visited them. In the first of the letters that have been preserved, there is a detailed account of an expedition to Narragansett by Norton and three friends, and of the hospitality of that quaint character 'Joe' Hazard, at his strange tower near the Pier. The letter, too long

for reproduction, has a pleasant flavor of Rhode Island in its pages. To the summers spent in Newport the Nortons owed their close friendship with a branch of the Middleton family of South Carolina. The following letter was written while Mr. Norton was paying a visit, with one of his sisters, to these friends on their island plantation of Edisto, near Charleston.

MIDWAY, EDISTO ISLAND

Good Friday Night, April 6, 1855. MY DEAR LOWELL: It is almost midnight, but I do not feel like going to bed, on the contrary I feel like writing to you. . . . Here it is perfect summer. I am writing by an open door that leads onto a piazza, below which is a garden, while beyond the garden at the foot of a steep bank flows a beautiful little river from whose opposite side stretches a wide spread of marshes, bordered far off by tall pine woods whose outline is here and there broken by cultivated fields. The air is close and damp with low-lying clouds, and in the south now and then comes a bright gleam of lightning. There is scarcely a sound but the whistling of the frogs, and as I write these words I hear the pattering of a soft rain.

This place is Mr. Middleton's cotton plantation, and the island on which it is produces the finest cotton in the world, the long, silky Sea Island cotton which is used for only the most delicate stuffs. We are some thirty miles south of Charleston, and to the softness of the Southern climate is added the luxury of sea air. One might fancy it the genuine, original Lotus island, for it woos one to voluptuous ease and indolence, and makes day-dreaming the natural condition of life.

Think of being woke up in the morning as I was yesterday and shall be to-morrow by the singing of mockingbirds on a tree that grows near my win

dow. Such a flood of song as they pour out would drown the music of all the nightingales that ever sang on the Brenta. Their song is the true essence of all sweet summer sounds, so rich in melody, so various, so soft and delicate, and then so loud and joyful that nothing more exquisite was ever heard even in the enchanted gardens of ro

mance.

We are seeing plantation life to great advantage, for this has the reputation of being one of the best managed plantations, and Mr. Middleton is a man of such kindness and liberality of heart that few better masters of slaves are to be found. But slavery in its mildest form is yet very sad, and it is on such a plantation, where the slaves are all contented, and well cared for so far as their physical condition is concerned, where they are treated with the consideration due to human beings, so far as their relations to each other and to their master extend, that one feels most bitterly the inherent evils of the system, and recognizes most distinctly the perplexities that it involves, and the responsibilities that it enforces. I have had much talk with all sorts of persons since being here, in regard to this subject. I have used the greatest freedom in expressing my own opinions, and it has been very pleasant to find that men were willing to discuss the subject fully and freely, and, however you might differ from them, without impatience or ill-feeling. It seems generally to be taken for granted that a great difference of opinion must exist, and that such difference is no ground for vexation. I confess that the result of these talks has been only to deepen the conviction that one of the worst effects of slavery is to deaden the moral feelings and to obscure the intellects of the masters. There are those, indeed, who escape this influence, but they are few.