assumption should be, on the whole, that the matter of rates and service can be left to the interest of the corporation itself.  In no other way can the American economic system retain that flexibility with which its past efficiency has been associated.  In no other way can the policy of these corporations continue to be, as it has so often been in the past, in an economic sense genuinely constructive.  This flexibility frequently requires readjustments in the conditions of local industry which cause grave losses to individuals or even communities; but it is just such readjustments which are necessary to continued economic efficiency; and it is just such readjustments which would tend to be prevented by an official rate-making authority.  An official rate-making power would necessarily prefer certain rigid rules, favorable to the existing distribution of population and business.  Every tendency to a new and more efficient distribution of trade would be checked, because of its unfairness to those who suffer from it.  Thus the American industrial system would gradually become petrified, and the national organization of American industry would be sacrificed for the benefit of an indiscriminate collection of local interests.

If the interest of a corporation is so essentially hostile to the public interest as to require the sort of official supervision provided by the New York Public Service Commission Law, the logical inference therefrom is not a system of semi-official and semi-private management, but a system of exclusively public management.  The logical inference therefrom is public ownership, if not actual public operation.  Public ownership is not open to the same theoretical objections as is government by commission.  It is not a system of divided responsibility.  Political conditions and the organization of the American civil service being what they are, the attempt of the authorities to assume such a responsibility might not be very successful; but the fault would in that case reside in the general political and administrative organization.  The community could not redeem the particular responsibility of owning and operating a railroad, because it was not organized for the really efficient conduct of any practical business.  The rejection of a system of divided personal responsibility between public and private officials does not consequently bring with it necessarily the rejection of a system of public ownership, if not public operation; and if it can be demonstrated in the case of any particular class of corporations that its interest has become in any essential respect hostile to the public interest, a constructive industrial policy demands, not a partial, but a much more complete, shifting of the responsibility.