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There are other proposals before Congress for amending the transportation acts. One of these contemplates a revision of the method of valuation for rate-making purposes to be followed by a renewed valuation of the railways. The valuations instituted by the Interstate Commerce Commission 10 years ago have not yet been completed.
The rate-making section of the Hepburn Act immediately resulted in a large increase in the number of complaints entered by shippers against the carriers. Previously, few cases had been taken to the Commission only 878 in eighteen years because relief was seldom obtained and then only at great cost in time and money.
If the suggestion appeals to the Congress, it will be well to specify that the labor division shall be constituted of representatives of the four rate-making territories, thereby assuring a tribunal conversant with the conditions which obtain in the different ratemaking sections of the country.
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.
If the suggestion appeals to the Congress, it will be well to specify that the labor division shall be constituted of representatives of the four rate-making territories, thereby assuring a tribunal conversant with the conditions which obtain in the different ratemaking sections of the country.
So far as most recent decisions go, however, this great statute has not altered the position of the Supreme Court of the United States as to the constitutional necessity of a reasonable return to the carrier, and perhaps the cardinal question remains to be decided, whether such rate-making power is legislative, and, if so, may under the Federal Constitution be delegated by Congress to any board.
There are other proposals before Congress for amending the transportation acts. One of these contemplates a revision of the method of valuation for rate-making purposes to be followed by a renewed valuation of the railways. The valuations instituted by the Interstate Commerce Commission 10 years ago have not yet been completed.
This is a very distinct tendency, and throughout the Union the States are rapidly passing laws that where a State-wide franchise is given, an exemption from taxes, a rate-making power, or other privilege, it shall be submitted to all the voters, and corresponding measures, street-railway franchises, gas, light, water, or other public-service corporations, acting only in definite localities, cities or towns, shall be referred in the appropriate locality.
The stolid man puffed with the exertion of expressing himself so fully, inadequate as his confused sentences were to describe all that fermenting mass of observation, impression, revulsion, disgust that his experience in the rate-making side of his employment had stored up within him the last fifteen years. Out of it had come a result a resolve. And it was this that Lane was combating heatedly.
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.
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