People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 January 1895 — The Pooling Bill. [ARTICLE]

The Pooling Bill.

The bill permitting railroads to pool their business, which has already passed the house, seems to hang up in the senate. 1 And thereby hangs a tale. Several senators are candidates for re-election before the legislatures of their states this winter. They both fear and court the railroad influence, which has frequently proven itself sufficiently powerful to make and unmake senators. Should the pooling bill pass before these senatorial elections, the railroad

influence, being satisfied, would be quiescent at least. Should a senator dare to oppose it, he would be very sure to be defeated by the railroads. Hence the bill is temporarily hung up. But it will eventually pass; we are quite convinced of that. What is this pooling bill? It is a measure to permit the railroads to combine, and divide among themselves the business of the various localities tributarj' to them, and thus prevent the various lines from competing with one another.

As a mere business proposition they would have a right to do this without any law; but the right to so combine to destroy competition was abridged by a section of the interstate commerce law. Then why not merely repeal that section? Because the railroads want something better. The repeal of that provision would simply leave ihe matter of pooling an open question, to be contested by those who are made to suffer by it. But repeal that provision with a law which actually authorizes pooling, and the ra’lroads may then destroy every vestige of competition, and fix rates as arbitrarily as though one man owned them all, and they can snap their fingers in the face of complaints, and point to the law of the United States which authorizes them to do that very thing.