Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Appendix to the Journals of the Senate and Assembly of the Session of the Legislature of the State of California, Vol. 5
Your committee has given to the subject-matter involved in these measures such consideration as its importance demands, and the other senatorial duties required of us would permit. We are sensi ble of the great interests involved, and the agitation that the public mind has undergone in respect to railroad management, and the relations of the companies to the public interests. We have endeav ored to give due consideration to the daily business intercourse existing between transportation companies and the community. We have realized the necessity for the enactment of a law more restrictive in its character, calculated to foster the leading industries of the State, to cripple none of them, and which, at the same time, would not impair the usefulness and efficiency of the transportation compa nies. We have recognized the strong desire of communities, not possessed of railroad conveniences, for the rapid construction of trunk and branch lines, and of the same desire on the part of the leading commercial centers to establish communication with the remote and more inaccessible districts of the coast. We have not been in doubt in respect to the right to readjust maximum rates, but the extent to which it could be wisely and judiciously exercised, and the mode and manner in which control should be enforced, we find full of embarrassment. The necessity for doing something effective, and that would realize the best public expectation, has been constantly confronted by the apprehension that in the lack of technical knowl edge of the subject, positive injuries to the prosperity of the State might result from any law We might pass.
In View of the experience of other American States, in their efforts to deal with this subject, we may well doubt the practical workingsof any law that seeks to classify roads and the business done by them. In Europe, a constant struggle to legislate for the public interest in respect to transportation companies has been going on for about forty years. The English Parliament has brought into requisition the services of her first statesmen, in the endeavor to solve the rail road problems. Charles Francis Adams, in the March number of the Atlantic Monthly, after referencer to the positions occupied by the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel, says that a committee was appointed in eighteen hundred and seventy-two, including among its numbers, the Marquis of Salisbury, and the Earl of Derby, which gave to the whole subject an intelligent consideration. Unlike its predecessors, that committee did not leave the railroad problem where it found it. On the contrary, they advanced it by one entire stage on the road to its solution. In the first place, after taking a vast amount of evidence, they proceeded to review the forty years of experience. The result of that review may be stated in a few words. They show with grim precision how, during that period, the English railroad legislation had never accomplished any thing which it sought to bring about, nor prevented any thing which it sought to hinder. Further along Mr. Adams says: Finally, the committee examined all those various panaceas for railroad abuses which are so regularly each year brought forward as novelties in the Legislatures of this country. To one familiar with the subject, the simple faith in which each law-maker brings forward as a new and hitherto unthought of solution of the whole trouble, some old famil iar expedient which has been tried and has broken down time and again, would have in it something quite touching were it not so very tedious. All these the English committee now passed in merciless review. Equal mileage rates they found inexpedient as well as impossible; the favorite idea of a revision of rates and fares with a View to establishing a legal tariff sufficient to afford a fair return, and no...
