No great intelligence is required to detect in this situation the evidence of a vicious circle.  The absorption of Americans in business affairs, and the free hand which the structure and ideals of American life granted them, had made business competition a fierce and merciless affair; while at the same time the fluid nature of American economic conditions made success very precarious.  Every shrewd and resolute man would seek to secure himself against the dangers of this situation by means of special advantages, and the most effective of all special advantages would, of course, be special railroad rates.  But a shipper such as John D. Rockefeller could obtain special rates only because the railroads were in a position similar to his own, and were fighting strenuously for supremacy.  The favored shipper and the railroad both excused themselves on the ground of self-preservation, and sometimes even claimed that it was just for a large shipper to obtain better rates than a small one.  This was all very well for the larger shipper and the railroad, but in the meantime what became of the small shipper, whom Mr. Rockefeller was enabled to annihilate by means of his contracts with the railroad companies?  The small shipper saw himself forced out of business, because corporations to whom the state had granted special privileges as common carriers, had a private interest in doing business with his bigger, more daring, and unscrupulous competitors.

Of course no such result could have happened, if at any point in this vicious circle of private interests, there had been asserted a dominant public interest; and there are several points at which such an interest might well have been intruded.  The circle would have been broken, if, for instance, the granting of illegal rebates had been effectively prohibited; but as a matter of fact they could not be effectively prohibited by the public authorities, to whom either the railroads or the large shippers were technically responsible.  A shipper of oil in Cleveland, Ohio, would have a difficult time in protesting against illegal discrimination on the part of a railroad conducting an inter-state business and organized under the laws of New York.  No doubt he could appeal to the Federal government; but the Federal government had been, for the time being, disqualified by many different causes from effective interference.  In the first place there was to be overcome the conventional democratic prejudice against what was called centralization.  A tradition of local control over the machinery of transit and transportation was dominant during the early period of railroad construction.  The fact that railways would finally become the all-important vehicles of inter-state commerce was either overlooked or considered unimportant.  The general government did not interfere—­except when, as in the case of the Pacific lines, its interference and assistance were solicited by private interests.  For a long time the idea that the Federal government had any general responsibility in respect to the national transportation system was devoid of practical consequences.