The Masses (periodical)/Volume 1/Number 2/Railroads

by Ellis O. Jones

Railroads

 

The Advantage of Ignorance in General and about Railroads in Particular

 

By Ellis O. Jones

 

I KNOW less to-day than I ever did, and the fact fills me with a glowing pride. There was a time when I tried to find out things, but I have given it up. It's no use. There's nothing to find out. One may have opinions, but knowledge doesn't affect opinions, except to confuse them. Only desires affect opinions.

A case in point is the railroads. There was a time when I earnestly tried to find out something about railroads. And I succeeded. I accumulated facts of all kinds.

I figured out the average cost of construction both as to small quantities and in carload lots, the cost of maintenance of lobbies, municipal, State and national. I determined the birth rate and the death rate of locomotives and the average cost per ton passenger. I read all the statistics I could get hold of showing the disadvantages of safety devices, the relative effects of rough roadbeds on occupants of the upper berths as compared with the lower berths. I conducted experiments to show how much dust a plush-car seat would hold to the square inch. I knew exactly what an Interstate was and its political complexion.

I could expatiate intelligently on the relative merits of majority stockholders as against widows and orphans. I knew the functions of a minority stockholder and his rights, if any. I knew just how much a passenger car could wobble without turning over and just how annoyed the officials would be if it did turn over.

When the question arose as to whether the Interstate Commerce Commission was a necessity or a luxury I could dissertate learnedly on either side without a moment's preparation. I could show conclusively why trains should not reach their destinations on time if possible. I knew why baggage men were congenitally destructive. I could decipher a time table with the nonchalance of a college professor in a Greek excavation. I knew exactly how much the public owed the railroads and how much the railroads owed the public and how much of both these debts was still unpaid.

I was as familiar with freight traffic as with passenger. I knew the precise ethical grounds for charging all the traffic would bear and why the traffic should be forbearing. I penetrated the innermost consciousness of rate charts and found they could justify the wildest seeming disparities with convincing analyses. I discovered and proved the ethnological warrant for charging more to send a ton of wheat from St. Paul to Seattle than from St. Paul to China. I knew why it cost more to send goods in an easterly direction than in a westerly direction and vice versa.

I could take a set of railroad books and show the railroad was losing money on every single variety of traffic, while at the same time paying dividends on stock that represented no investment. I knew why investors and Wall Street brokers were much more indispensable to railroads than engineers, firemen, brakemen and conductors. I could state accurately within a fraction of a cent what constituted a fair wage, a fair capitalization, a fair interest on bonds, a fair dividend on stocks, a fair payment to injured passengers and a fair compensation for damaged freight.

All these and many other exact things I knew. I could reel them off by the ton mile, up grade or down grade, with equal momentum. But I found it was no use. I got nowhere. I could not settle the railroad problem. So I determined to forget it, and now I know nothing whatever about it. It is all shrouded in mystery. There are the railroads and here are the people and there you are.

In my present state of blissful ignorance I can laugh at all those who know so much. When I hear that the Interstate Commerce Commission is going to probe something or other I laugh. I laugh because I have been through it all and know how futile it will be. I laugh because they have already been at it for many years and yet the railroad problem grows more acute all the time.

When I pick up the newspaper and read the learned discourse of some editorial writer, in which he shows that all the railroads need is more confidence, I laugh. I laugh because he knows and that is his fatal mistake. I laugh because across the street I can find another editor who knows that it isn't confidence, but justice, that the railroads need. Another editor knows that they need sympathy. Another that they have too many employees; another that they have too many investors. Another knows that the problem is caused by what Jay Gould did to the Erie or by what Harriman did to the Alton. Another knows that if the railroad magnates all voted the Democratic ticket the thing would be simple.

All these editors, reformers and what-not, are hyperserious. They cannot laugh. They cannot laugh because they know too many details. I alone may laugh because of my discovery that the more of these details we have the farther we get from the solution of the railroad problem. Their opinions are worthless because they are based on exact knowledge, on elaborate statistics, on scholarly reasoning, on reports of commissions, on the wisdom and greed of magnates, on the decisions of pompous judges, and on many other impedimenta from which an ignorant man like myself is free.

Out of all these details I have retained but the simplest fact. The railroads are owned by private individuals. Consequently they are run primarily in the interest of those individuals and not in the interest of the masses. If the railroads were owned by the masses, they would be run in the interest of the masses and not in the interest of private individuals.

That's all any of us need to know. If we try to find out more, we succeed only in confusing ourselves with the moonshine of highly paid corporation lawyers.