High among sovereign powers has always ranked the ownership and administration of highways.  And it is evident why this should have been so.  Movement is life, and the stoppage of movement is death, and the movement of every people flows along its highways.  An invader has only to cut the communications of the invaded to paralyze him, as he would paralyze an animal by cutting his arteries or tendons.  Accordingly, in all ages and in all lands, down to the nineteenth century, nations even partially centralized have, in their corporate capacity, owned and cared for their highways, either directly or through accountable agents.  And they have paid for them by direct taxes, like the Romans, or by tolls levied upon traffic, as many mediaeval governments preferred to do.  Either method answers its purpose, provided the government recognizes its responsibility; and no government ever recognized this responsibility more fully than did the autocratic government of ancient Rome.  So the absolute regime of eighteenth-century France recognized this responsibility when Louis XVI undertook to remedy the abuse of unequal taxation, for the maintenance of the highways, by abolishing the corvee.

Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, the application, by science, of steam to locomotion, made railways a favorite speculation.  Forthwith, private capital acquired these highways, and because of the inelasticity of the old law, treated them as ordinary chattels, to be 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