It seems astounding that any one
should have questioned the necessity of setting up regulations.
And will not posterity wonder, when it learns that only in the
first decade of the twentieth century did we provide laws against
the cruel and killing labor of little children, and against
impure foods and drugs?
Year after year, the railroads furnished unending causes for
legislative control. There were the old laws which the railroad
men tried to evade and which the President, as was his duty,
insisted on enforcing; and still more insistent and spectacular
were the new problems. Just as three or four hundred years ago
the most active and vigorous Frenchmen and English men tried to
get possession of large tracts of land, or even of provinces, and
became counts and dukes, so the Americans of our generation, who
aspired to lead the pushing financier class, worked day and night
to own a railroad. Naturally one railroad did not satisfy a man
who was bitten by this ambition; he reached out for several, or
even for a transcontinental system.
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