from the vessels being laid up in the summer. In December 1875, an agreement was made between the railroads to maintain rates but it was broken two months later and a large part of the year 1876 was marked by a fierce and destructive war of rates. A mention of most of the prevailing freight charges will hardly convey an idea of the fierceness of the war, for the reason that since 1876, a great reduction has been made in the cost of carrying freight with a corresponding reduction in regular rates, yet a traffic manager of to-day would assert that it would mean absolute ruin to carry cattle from Chicago to New York for a dollar a carload which rate was made during the conflict. Passenger rates were likewise demoralized and the only good feature of the war was that the low fares permitted a vast number of persons to visit the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia who otherwise would have been debarred from this improving influence. Low rates to Philadelphia need not necessarily have influenced the whole through traffic but this was a war in which the encounters were at many places. A concrete case will illustrate the advantage of the passenger who travelled between competitive points. Two persons going from Cleveland to Boston in August 1876 compared notes as to the cost of their journey. One had paid $6.80 for his ticket from Cleveland to Boston, the other had the courtesies of the Lake Shore and Boston and Albany railroads as the common giving of free passes was called. While this person paid nothing from Cleve

1 Written before the Great War beginning in August 1914.

* Hadley, The Amer. Railway, 361; Railroads, Their Origin and Problems, C. F. Adams, 152. Adams mentions a number of rates that were made in 1876.

land to Buffalo and nothing from Albany to Boston, he had to buy a ticket from Buffalo to Albany for which he paid the legal rate of two cents per mile or $5.94. His passes covering considerably more than half of his journey of 682 miles had saved him eighty-six cents.1

While the railroad war may have been of transitory benefit to a few, its general and lasting results were not only ruinous to the bondholders and stockholders of the railroads but were bad for the business community at large. Simple fidelity to a fair agreement would have ended it in a day but this seemed impossible to bring about. Agreements were made but were soon broken. It was said that a railroad president, who had himself solemnly promised to maintain rates, went out from the meeting of railroad presidents and managers, and immediately cut the rates to secure a large amount of desirable business. More frequently would a freight agent be guilty of the infraction; openly condemned by his superior his offence was winked at. Such "smartness" presumably placed him in the line of promotion; so his example was demoralizing to other competitors. In his despair an honest freight agent was heard to say that he

This is partly from memory. I was the passenger who bought the ticket from Cleveland to Boston and my distinct recollection is that I paid $6.80 for it. Professor Henry E. Bourne has made a search in the Cleveland newspapers for me and finds in August, 1876 (the month in which I made the journey) an advertised rate from Cleveland to New York of $6.50. The ordinary difference in fares to Boston would be more than 30 cents, yet I seem to remember the $6.50 fare to New York and the $6.80 to Boston; on the pro-rata basis the fare would have been $7.09. The charter of the N. Y. Central R. R. (Apr. 2, 1853) limited its passenger fares to two cents per mile but the N. Y. Central R. R. people maintained that this applied only to local fares, while Albany and Buffalo were through points. The distance from Buffalo to Albany is 297 miles; at two cents per mile the fare is $5.94. It is possible it may have been a trifle higher in 1876.

wished Congress would pass a law compelling the railroads to keep their agreements. Public sentiment received a fit expression in these words of the Commercial and Financial Chronicle: "A railroad war of the trunk lines is about as certain in recurrence as the smallpox or the change of seasons. Periodically, and with many formalities, agreements are made between the rival parties and periodically, but without any formality, the agreements thus made are broken. . . . How childish is this marching up a hill and then marching down again every few months by our great railroads kings!" 1 Thomas A. Scott declared that "during the first six months of 1877, not a farthing was made on through competitive freight by any line."2 John Sherman wrote to his agent in London: "The railroad companies have for several years competed with each other in a very improvident and reckless way and are now, and have been for some time, carrying freight for less than cost. This has caused a large reduction of the net income of roads, has led to the loss of dividends, and now to the reduction of wages of employes to rates scarcely sufficient to support life. Hence the strikes." 3

In April 1877 the railroad presidents entered into a fresh agreement in regard to rates and this was made

1 April 7, 1877, 308.

2 Testimony, Pa. Riots, 929. This is the report of the committee appointed to investigate the railroad riots in July 1877 made to the Pa. Legislative in 1878. It will be referred to as Pa. Riots.

3 Aug. 6. Sherman's Recollections, i. 582. See C. F. Adams, Railroads, Their Origin and Problems, article in The American Railway; Hadley, Railroad Transportation, article in The American Railway; Johnson, Amer. Railway Transportation; Ripley, Railway Problems; Burton, Crises and Depressions; J. S. Thorold Rogers in Princeton Review, Jan. 1879; Brassey, Nineteenth Century, May 1879; Appletons' Ann. Cyc., 1874-1877; Commercial and Financial Chronicle; The Nation, 1877.

more solid by a subsequent one, dividing the west-bound tonnage by percentages under a pooling arrangement. Both these agreements were to take effect on July 1, but, confronted with the immense falling off in earnings due to the hard times and their own unwisdom, the presidents did not wait for results from these agreements; in order to recoup themselves for past losses, they somewhat hastily and jauntily announced a reduction of ten per cent in the wages of their employés. This was done on the New York-Philadelphia-office-ultimatum-plan which I may thus describe: the railroad president in his well-appointed office, with the wage sheet on his desk, calculated that the engineer, fireman and brakeman, receiving so much by the job or by the day, obtained adequate monthly wages and that they could afford to help in bearing the burden of the commercial depression. The next step was the posting of a peremptory order announcing the ten per cent reduction. Herein lay two errors: the one, logical, the other administrative. For, in the first place, due weight was not given to the unsteadiness of the work. With laudable intent too many men were kept on the rolls on the principle that half a loaf is better than no bread. Moreover some of the work was done under conditions which reduced the net return; for example crews of freight trains were left away from home a day or a night with their board and lodging to pay. The other error lay in reducing the wages hastily by a peremptory order. Thomas A. Scott, the president of the Pennsylvania railroad, denied that there was any agreement among the railroads to reduce wages and did not know whether such a policy was discussed at a meeting of the presidents held in the en

deavor to agree upon a system of pooling earnings.1 But the uniform action seems to suggest some tacit understanding. This was not necessary to meet combinations among laborers; though the powerful organization of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers was already in existence, trade-unionism on the whole was in its infancy. It is almost certain that if the division-superintendents, master mechanics and other like officials of any one railroad had been called into council with their president, they would have advised against an arbitrary reduction. They were close to the men having, not infrequently, social relations at least with the locomotive engineers, and they were aware how hard the reduced traffic was bearing on the employés. Their plan would have been to say to the men, Come let us reason together. Each would have presented his side, the grievances on the one hand, the necessities of the situation on the other. Employers and employed might then have stood shoulder to shoulder in an honest endeavor to cope with a deplorable condition of affairs. The locomotive engineers were a high class of labor, acquiring little properties, creating homes, having a stake in the country, patriotic; and while it was not primarily their strike, their active sympathy and coöperation was an important factor in it. They might have been moderators instead of being one of the parties to the conflict. Whatever might have been the outcome of such a plan, it would have been better than the actual event.

The drama opened at Martinsburg, West Virginia, on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad on which the ten per cent. reduction was ordered to take effect on July 16. 1 Pa. Riots, 928.