For that evil is not exorbitant rates, but uneven and unequal rates. What the shipper and the public in general want is not primarily low rates, but regular and equal rates. So long as there is competition between rival roads, so long one road will offer special advantages to large shippers in order to get their business and other roads will be compelled to follow suit. There is a

The Outlook heartily indorses the fundamental position respecting railway rate regulation taken by Mr. Paul Morton in his article printed on another page of this issue. Mr. Morton is a railway expert; our indorsement is of value only as it represents non-expert opinion.

There are two methods of dealing with the railroad problem. One is to prevent combination between parallel lines of railroad, and trust to competition to prevent unfair dealing. The other is to permit if not encourage combinations, and simultaneously bring the railroads under Government supervision. The first method trusts to the rivalry of selfseeking interests to protect the public; the other trusts to a Government organization with power which represents the public. Congress does not appear to be clear in its mind which of these plans is the best. It therefore attempts to combine them; and, by attempting to satisfy the advocates of both plans, satisfies the advocates of neither. It has hitherto prohibited pooling; that is, it has forbidden competing railroads to agree together on a price to be charged for freight, and then divide the freight among themselves in some proportion to be agreed upon; and it has created an Inter-State Commerce Commission to watch the railroads, but has given it no power to control the railroads.

We have no doubt that the remedy for favoritism in the administration of the public highways is not prohibition of competition, but Government control. The former is a failure because the first effect of prohibiting combination is not to prevent it, but only to make it secret and therefore more injurious; and the second effect is not to cure the evil from which shippers suffer, but to aggravate

from New York to Chicago. No man can get his letter carried for less because he is on special terms with the postmaster. What the country wants is a freight rate as uniform as a postage rate. The railroad may charge less for 1,000 pounds than one hundred times what it charges for 10 pounds; but not. less to A for carrying 1,000 pounds than it charges to B. Competition has no effect to secure any such uniformity of rate. On the contrary, its effect is to produce inequality of rates. If the law makes it necessary to underbid a rival in order to get business, the rival will be underbid, and the highways of the Nation will be run in the interest of favored shippers.

Congress should abolish the prohibition against pooling, for the prohibition does no good and does much harm. But Congress should at the same time bring the combination under Government control. Otherwise the shipper must accept whatever rate the railroad chooses to offer. Without such control, before the public can use the highway which the public have really created, the public must pay whatever tolls the managers of the road think is fair, if they are just men, or can extort, if they are unscrupulous men. The Western farmer must pay the rate, whatever it may be, or leave his corn and wheat to rot upon the ground. The only possible way of meeting this essential injustice is to meet the railroad combination with a combination of the people. Power to fix the rates must be lodged somewhere. There is less likelihood of injustice if it is lodged in an impartial tribunal representing all the people than if it is lodged in a board of railroad directors who represent only the railroads. Whether this body should be

Postal Fraud Laws

111

Mr. Morton's article is especially significant because it affords a demonstration that fair-minded railroad men and fair-minded shippers are of one mind on this subject. Their interests are not antagonistic. In fact, representatives of both classes urged upon the President the necessity for reform, and agreed on the essential principles of that reform, and the President incorporated their counsels in his recent Message. The opposition to this measure does not come from the railroads, though opposition comes from certain railroad managers who believe that the public highways are their private property and are to be managed, exclusively in the interests of private owners. Opposition certainly does not come from the shippers, though it comes from some shippers who, by reason of railroad favoritism, have been able to crowd their rivals out of business and secure a monopoly of their trade by obtaining a monopoly of the transportation of the articles of their trade.

And this opposition is reinforced by that very considerable class of perfectly fair-minded and honest men who always dread experiments, not seeing whither they will lead. These disinterested opponents can be persuaded; the interested opponents must be simply voted down. And if they are to be voted down in Congress, it is necessary to create outside of Congress a strong and intelligent public sentiment in support of the doctrine so ably presented by Secretary Morton-that the public highways must be controlled by the public; a sentiment so strong that it cannot

The Assistant Attorney of the PostOffice Department gives to our readers on another page a very interesting account of some of the fraudulent schemes which the Post-Office Department has unearthed and to which it has put an end. This it has done under a Federal law which authorizes the PostmasterGeneral, upon satisfactory evidence that the mails are being used by a lottery or by any fraudulent scheme, to issue a fraud order instructing the postmasters to return to the senders or send to the Dead Letter Office all mail addressed to the managers of the lottery or the fraudulent scheme, and to refuse payment to them of all money-orders. Were it not for this law, any clever, unprincipled person could enrich himself in a few months, using the post-office for that purpose. Deprived of this law, the people of the country, especially of the poorer classes, would be swindled of millions of dollars every year.

Until the middle of the last century lotteries were operated in England and America by governments, churches, and benevolent societies as a source of revenue. Parliament and Congress authorized their conduct; States, cities, and towns raised thousands of dollars by this method. Money for the improvement of the streets of Washington was once secured by means of a lottery authorized by Congress. In striking contrast with the plethora of money seeking investment in United States Government securities to-day is the effort of the Colonial Congress of 1779 to secure a loan of $800,000 by offering, in addition to four per cent. interest, $276,000 to be distributed by lot among subscribers. Sanctioned thus by State and Church, the lottery thrived. Society asserted it to be legal and moral. Chancellor Kent said it was "" a fair way to reach the pockets of misers and persons disposed to dissipate their funds."

This attitude still continues in many European countries. But in America opinion regarding lotteries has under

gone a great reversion. The people have not been content with passing laws against fraudulent lotteries, but have incorporated provisions in their State Constitutions prohibiting all lotteries. Louisiana, in 1893, was the last to prohibit them.

The desire for protection against fraudulent lotteries, and not a feeling that lotteries honestly conducted are pernicious and immoral, gave rise to the Federal laws of 1872, the first of importance upon this subject. The Postmaster-General was authorized to issue "fraud orders" against fraudulent lotagainst fraudulent lotteries only. Not until 1890 was this limitation removed and the word "fraudulent" dropped from the law. 'Until 1895 the order was confined to registered mail, but at that time it was made applicable to all mail.

This postal law is the most potent agency for the suppression of lotteries in the United States. To-day little trouble is encountered in its speedy enforcement. The vigilance of postmasters and other officials reduces the matter relating to lotteries passing through the mails to a minimum. All newspapers containing lottery advertisements or notices are excluded from the mail. All matter concerning pool-selling is also barred from the mails, the Department following the decisions of the State courts, notably those of New York and New Jersey, in holding pools upon horse-racing to be lotteries. American genius is constantly devising new schemes containing elements of chance appealing to human avarice in the hope that the officials or the courts will hold them not to be in violation of law. The most successful evasion of the law thus far has been by means of guessing contests. In these, prizes aggregating $75,000 and upwards in one contest have been offered to persons making "the nearest correct estimates" of the number of votes cast in an election, the number of paid admissions to the World's Fair, etc. Until quite recently, the law received a strict construction, and these contests were held not to be lotteries, because, as alleged, the estimates were determined by judgment based upon research, and

not merely by chance. This decision has lately been reversed, and upon grounds which appear to us to be incontrovertibly correct. Thus, the man best qualified to estimate the result of the Census of 1900, the Director of the Census, predicted that it would be about 72,500,000. It was 75,994,575. It cannot be successfully denied that a person comparatively ignorant of conditions might have guessed nearer the actual figure than the estimate of the Director of the Census, and that his doing so would have been a mere matter of chance. Under the present rule of the Court, the Post-Office authorities will scrutinize each of these guessing contests on its own merits, and where the lottery element is evident will stamp the scheme as fraudulent and deny it mailing privileges.

The constitutionality of these statutes has been denied upon the three grounds: First, that they provide no judicial hearing upon the question as to whether the operating scheme is fraudulent; secondly, because they authorize the seizing of all letters without discriminating between those which may contain and those which may not contain prohibited matter; and, thirdly, because they empower the Postmaster-General to confiscate the money of the addressee, or the representative of money, which has become his property by the depositing of the letter in the mails.

The Supreme Court has recently considered these three objections, affirmed their insufficiency, and affirmed also the constitutionality of the law, upon the broad ground that the Federal Government, in undertaking the carriage of the mails, has an unqualified right to determine what it will carry and upon what conditions. The Court said:

We find no difficulty in sustaining_the postal service is by no means an indispensaconstitutionality of these sections. The ble adjunct to a civil government, and for hundreds, if not for thousands, of years the trusted to the hands of friends or to private transmission of private letters was either inenterprise. . . It was not until 1845, when the postage was reduced to five and ten cents, according to the distance, and a stamp or stamps introduced, that it [the postal service] assumed anything of the importance it now possesses. The legislative body in thus establishing a postal

service may annex such conditions to it as it chooses. In establishing such system Congress may restrict its use to letters, and deny it to periodicals; it may include periodicals and exclude books; it may admit books to the mails and refuse to admit merchandise."

The apprehension at one time entertained by conservatives lest legitimate business enterprises might suffer from an arbitrary enforcement of this law has not proved well grounded. A conservative spirit has characterized the administration of the law in the past. There has been no abuse of the authority the law conferred upon the Government, and no illustrations of the exercise of that authority except in cases of palpable fraud. And it is impossible to estimate the amount of money that has been saved to the innocent and unwary by the

enforcement of this beneficent statute.

Two Public Benefactors

The spiritual dignity and value of a man's life lie in the preponderance of the element of unselfish service in his vocation. This service may be rendered either in the practice of a vocation or in the use to which the rewards of a vocation are put. Teachers of all kinds, for instance, artists, statesmen, directly serve the common welfare by their daily work; many men dealing with practical affairs serve the same end by the use to which they put the returns of their daily work. Last week this country suffered a permanent loss by death of two men who conspicuously represented these two kinds of service, and whose lives were full of the dignity which such service brings.

Theodore Thomas, dying at his home in Chicago in his seventy-first year, has left behind him an unbroken record of artistic achievement. From the beginning to the end of that career there was never a moment of faltering in loyalty to the highest standards of the musical art; in steadiness and consistency of purpose that career was unbroken. Born in a little town in Germany, brought to this country when a child, he played his first solo in public at the age of twelve, in the old Astor Place Opera-House, New York City; and he began his career as a musician by playing in concert and

opera orchestras during the American tours of the early singers of European reputation who came to this country. Until 1861 he was a member of different German and Italian opera troupes, and served as concert-master. In 1855 he began, in connection with other musicians, a series of chamber-concerts, which continued for a period of fourteen years. In 1862 the Philharmonic Society of Brooklyn appointed him conductor, a position which he held for nearly thirty years. From 1864 to 1869 he conducted his own symphony concerts, resuming them in 1872, and securing, as a result, both by his programmes and by his genius as a conductor, a National reputation. In 1872 he went to Cincinnati with his orchestra, and his presence in that city encouraged its music-lovers, who have always been many, to arrange a meeting of the choral societies of the

West; and this proved to be the begin

ning of the musical festivals which have made that city one of the centers of musical interest in the country, and have resulted in the building of Springer Hall and the College of Music. In 1878 Mr. Thomas became Director of the latter institution, coming to New York monthly to conduct the Philharmonic concerts, of which he remained conductor until 1891, when he was called to Chicago and organized the Chicago Symphony concerts, of which he was conductor at the time of his death. To his work in connection with these concerts he added concerts for young people, symphony concerts, popular concerts, he gave for a time a series of delightful high-class concerts in a garden in New York City, and more than any other man he educated the public of New York to an appreciation and love of the best music. He made no concessions to popular taste; but he was so thoroughly the master of the art of conducting, so profoundly imbued with the musical spirit, so firm in his faith in the power of the highest music to appeal to and satisfy even those who were musically uneducated, that he built up rapidly a devoted constituency, and accustomed them to the best interpretation of the best music.

It is to Theodore Thomas more than

to any other man that the intelligent appreciation and understanding of music which characterize New York are due. His taste was wonderfully catholic. He held to the old with tenacity, but he welcomed the new with hospitality. No man loved Beethoven more, no man interpreted Bach with the orchestra with greater sympathy; but, on the other hand, no man so persistently and finally so victoriously interpreted and popularized the music of Wagner. The large number of men and women in New York who went to school to Mr. Thomas and gained their insight into music from his baton have not forgotten the quiet, persistent enthusiasm with which in those days he made Wagner's music familiar in New York City.

This catholicity Mr. Thomas retained to the last day of his life, together with unworn enthusiasm and freshness of feeling; his latest programmes included the oldest and the newest music. What he did in New York in the earlier part of his career he repeated in Chicago in the later years; and to him more than to any other single man, as a result of his earlier work in Cincinnati and his latest work in Chicago, is due the widespread and growing enthusiasm for music in the Central West. When he went to Chicago, eleven years ago, his reputation had secured over six thousand names on the subscription list of the Chicago Symphony Organization and subscriptions amounting to $450,000, a fund of $750,000 having been fixed as the amount necessary to put the orchestra on a permanent basis. The Auditorium was crowded at all his twenty-four evening and twenty-four afternoon concerts. Not only was this money raised, but the noble Orchestra Hall was built and dedicated last month, and Mr. Thomas had the satisfaction of conducting four concerts in this new home before his death. He lived to face a great and tumultuous audience three weeks ago at the dedication of Orchestra Hall in Chicago, but he did not live to receive what would have been an equally cordial welcome and personal recognition from a great audience in Carnegie Hall on his return to conduct a concert during the coming season. No man is perfect

either in his character or in his art; but it must be said of Theodore Thomas that from the beginning to the end he never faltered in his devotion to the highest ends of his art, and that his devotion became the opportunity for a great service; for he made the art of music understood and loved by tens of thousands who had no technical training.

Mr. William H. Baldwin, Jr., who died at his summer home on Long Island last week after a long and painful illness, was an exceptionally fine type of the educated man in business. He combined in an unusual way the best qualities of what is called the self-made man and of the man who has had good educational opportunities. Receiving a thorough training at the Roxbury Latin School, in Harvard College, and in the Harvard Law School, he entered business life at the lowest level, going directly from the Law School into the service of the Union Pacific Railroad as a clerk. His fortune was in his own hands from the start, and his rapid rise was due to his exceptionally high character, his force, and his intelligence. Before the year was out he had become the General Traffic Manager of the Union Pacific at Omaha. A year later he was made Division Freight Agent of the same road at Butte, Montana, and not many months subsequent he was advanced to the presidency of the Montana Union Railroad. In 1890 he was elected Assistant Vice-President of the Union Pacific; from June, 1891, to July, 1894, he was General Manager of the Flint and Père Marquette Railroad of Michigan. Then, removing to Washington, he accepted the Third VicePresidency of the Southern Railroad, being advanced to the office of Second Vice-President two years later. In the same year, by the death of Mr. Austin Corbin, the presidency of the Long Island Railroad became vacant, and the position was offered to Mr. Baldwin by a group of financiers. He handled the affairs of that road with characteristic discretion, foresight, and boldness; and the story of his success is perhaps best told by the statement that on his deathbed, in his forty-first year, he was presi