words, “similar circumstances and conditions,” in the Federal law may mean.  There is no doubt that actual differences in cost of service make dissimilar conditions; but does geographical situation, such as is recognized in the long-and-short-haul clause? or still more, the amount of business offering, or the amount of possible competition?  Very early the Interstate Commerce Commission and our legislation got to the point of recognizing competition by water; but the competition of other railroads was a thing harder to recognize.  Many people think they have a right to a fairly equivalent service at a fairly equivalent cost throughout the United States, and that they have a right to all the advantages of their geographical position.  The farmers in Westchester County, about New York, thought they had undoubted reason to complain when the rates on milk were made the same from their farms to the city as from farms in Ohio; pointing out, indeed, that they had bought their farms originally, and paid high prices for the land, for the very reason of its geographical situation close to a great market.  Yet in our courts the economic rule has usually prevailed; although no legislation, so far as I have found, recognizes such differences, except under some vague expression such as service or discrimination “under like or similar conditions.”  Whether legislation will ever come to the point of recognizing the railroad man’s shibboleth, “charge what the traffic will bear,” is perhaps dubious.  And the new Taft Act, in its long-and-short-haul provision, takes a long step in the direction of geographical uniformity and rigidity of rates.

A few examples of modern rate regulation may be given.  In 1896 South Carolina fixed a flat passenger rate of three and one-quarter cents per mile.  Both South Carolina and Virginia have empowered the railway or public service commission to fix all rates, including telephone and telegraph.  Passenger rates are now usually fixed at two cents per mile in the East, or at two and one-half cents in the South or West.  In 1907 Kansas and Nebraska arbitrarily reduced all freight rates fifteen per cent. on the price then charged.  In 1907 there was some evidence of reaction; Alabama, in an extra session, repealed her law enacted the same year prescribing maximum freight rates, substituting more moderate rates in seven “groups” (which, however, may be changed by the railway commission!), and also enacted a statute directing the commission and the attorney-general not to enforce the earlier law; while the heavily penal Minnesota law was declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court.  In the British empire the power to fix rates is, of course, unquestioned; and they are, as to railways at least, generally regulated by law.  Canada in 1903 established a railroad commission, and Nova Scotia in 1908 imposed various restrictions as to tolls, still the English word for rates.  So in Ontario and Quebec in 1906, and in Tasmania in 1901.  In many States, such as Victoria, the railways are owned by the state, in which case, of course, no question as to the right to fix rates can arise.