It is not to be understood that, having re-established the right to divide competitive traffic by agreement and surrounded it with incidents making toward effectiveness, Congress can forego the further regulation of interstate railway transportation. The legacy of evil resulting from methods pursued during thirty years will prove persistent without supplemental legislation. The experience of a decade has shown no error in the principles underlying the Interstate Commerce law except that actuating the attempt to perpetuate competition. In many instances the means provided were weak and almost valueless, in others the language employed failed to express clearly the intention of Congress, but there is no reason to believe that the necessity of a board of experts in transportation, with authority to adjudicate upon matters of disagreement between the public and the railways, to investigate complaints and award suitable redress, is any less than was at first supposed. In order, however, that the labor of such a board may become of material value, there must be provided an harmonious and homogeneous railway system with which it can deal, practically as though it were a unit instead of being obliged to act separately upon a thousand corporate entities; and in addition there must be substantial finality to its conclusions in regard to those technical, economic, and social facts which, being a board of transportation experts, it is best qualified intelligently to consider and wisely to determine. Though Congress refrained, no doubt wisely and possibly in obedience to constitutional limitations, from conferring upon the Interstate Commerce Commission the powers of a Federal court, and that body must depend upon the latter for the enforcement of its decrees, the right exercised by the courts of considering each case de novo upon application for such enforcement, and the privilege of introducing new evidence and adopting a new line of defence extended to the railways, have been continually productive of confusion and delay. There is no constitutional objection to restricting Federal courts to a determination of the legal merits of each special case upon facts found by the Commission either on the original hearing or as supplemented by those elucidated at a rehearing, the case being remanded to the Commission for that purpose. For nearly the entire period of its existence it was supposed that the Commission had been given authority to prescribe, after due investigation, in which all inter-

ested parties had been accorded opportunity to introduce evidence, those rates which appeared reasonable and just. A recent decision by the Supreme Court of the United States has declared that Congress did not effectually confer this power. It is important that it should be expressly granted in unmistakableterms. It should include the determination of reasonable minimum as well as maximum rates, not merely that a well-located and profitable railway shall not be made bankrupt by a reckless competitor, but in order to protect individuals and communities against the unjust discriminations that may result from too low charges by the lines serving their competitors.

The idea that the methods, accounts, et cetera, of quasi-public corporations are matters of public interest, in regard to which the fullest information should be at all times available to legislators and publicists generally, seems to have controlled Congress in providing for the publication of schedules of railway charges, the collection of railway statistics, and the provision for annual and special reports from the Interstate Commerce Commission. No feature of the law has worked so satisfactorily; but here, too, failure fully to appreciate the scope of the work has been productive of inadequacy in the result. The extension of statistical inquiries to depot and express companies, fast freight lines, elevator and wharf companies, and water lines engaged in interstate transportation, owing to their intimate relation with railway corporations, is absolutely prerequisite to the satisfactory statistical presentation of the business of railway transportation. There are also numerous and urgent reasons for a more thorough investigation of the financial results of railway business and for more - frequent reports of this phase of the work. There has been no attempt, in this paper, to enumerate all of the changes which, it is believed, must precede a satisfactory solution of railway problems, but those only have been mentioned which seem fundamental or most important. Whatever others may be necessary will be found, if the true principle underlying the social function of transportation is understood and appreciated, to be in the direction of unifying the facilities of transportation. In other words, there must be created, from the multitude of railway corporations, something that is now presumed to exist, and that in many respects does actually exist at present-a railway system.

H. T. NEWCOMB.

WOMAN'S POLITICAL EVOLUTION.

BY MRS. J. Ellen foster, president of woman's rEPUBLICAN ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES.

THE Church tells us that a sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. When the holy sacrament is reached, only the great Oversoul can know all the ministrations of good angels, all the contests with powers of darkness, all the continuous operations of human relations, through which the inward and spiritual grace has been attained.

The student of history learns that a revolution in government is an outward and visible sign of a change in the political conditions of the people. When through revolution a people without a name becomes a state, only the long perspective of history can reveal the action and counter-action of the forces-physical, social, economic, and religious, as well as political-which fling the new flag to the breeze and marshal the new armies of peace and

war.

The political economist knows that a so-called revolution in the social order is also a record of changes which have established the activities of new relations and the responsibilities of new alignments.

When society awakes to the realization that the old order is changed, that modes of thought are broadened, that habits of life are relaxed, that new social standards are set up, that new economic forces are dominant, and new political relations are aggressive, it is often forgotten that this social revolution is not the overt and aggregate act of iconoclasts and reformers, but is merely a record of the forces of progress.

This philosophy of development finds conspicuous illustration in the present status-industrial, educational, and political-of the women of the United States.

Society applauds present-day progress, as evidenced by enlarged opportunities of labor, and increased returns for work. It includes women in these favored classes, and enumerates the hundreds of occupations they may and do fill with acceptance to employers and profit to themselves.

Women are everywhere in the industrial world: the cook, the washwoman, the seamstress, the dressmaker, the milliner, and the teacher have been joined by the army of factory women, clerks, shop-girls, stenographers, typewriters, and professional women, so that now there are few business houses of any description where women are wholly absent. Nevertheless, the notion prevails, or at least lies dormant, in the minds of most persons, that men are the bread winners and women are the sheltered home-keepers. The facts are quite the contrary; at least, the exceptions to the rule are so many that this theory is not a sound basis of economic calculation. In the slums of the great cities the women, as a rule, are the bread winners; the men live on the labor of the women and children, or contribute little to the family exchequer. In the higher grades of labor and of skilled workmanship there are millions of women who go to their daily toil at the sound of the bell, the shriek of the whistle and the stroke of the clock, with the same regularity and urged by the same necessity as drives the army of men. Labor statistics assert that more than three-quarters of the wage-earning women of the country not only support themselves, but are the mainstay of dependent families. Those acquainted with the thousands of faithful, honorable women in Government service in the City of Washington know this to be true of them. I charge no fault to the men of the families-misfortune and death are no respecters of persons or of sex-I merely chronicle the facts and ask that notice be taken of the wide variance between the theory of woman's industrial condition and the facts in the case.

Women were never idlers. Once they spun the yarn and wove the cloth and made the garments of their families; they sewed with their needles and counted threads in fine embroideries; they milked the cows and made butter with their own hands. On the farm in the North and the plantation in the South, the wife and the mother was the Saint Courageous in sickness, and the Lady Bountiful in calamity, to the little and sometimes isolated community where she was greatest of all because she was servant of

all. The "women folks" economized that the boys might go to the academy in the winter, or possibly to college for a full course, or to the town to learn a trade, or to the city to go into business. Rarely did the daughter of the household go anywhere or do anything to fit herself for an independent individual exist

ence.

How is it now? The few sheep which were kept for the use of individual families have gone to join the great flocks that graze on Western plains and give their fleeces to the buyers of the syndicates which own the land and send its product to the distant market. The spinning wheel has of necessity left its place of usefulness in the family "living room," and now with other bric-a-brac adorns the parlor of the descendent of the gentle Priscilla who sang a psalm and dreamed a dream on the quiet day when John Alden attempted the impossible task of making love for another man.

The factory has superseded the loom and the spinning wheel, and for less money and less labor the family is better clothed than in the olden time. So also with hand sewing and general housekeeping. The sewing machine, and foreigners as servants, have driven away the blessed old days when the mother and the sisters did it all, save, perhaps, the annual or semi-annual help of the visiting seamstress.

The creamery and the cheese factory and the labor of hired men make the former work of women unprofitable, and largely reduce woman's task on the farm. In the West, where farming is conducted on a large scale, immigration has brought foreign women as well as foreign men to do the work formerly done by our mothers and grandmothers.

In the towns and cities modern conveniences have lifted many burdens from woman's shoulders, and steam heating and gas for lighting and cooking have given her hours of time for other duties.

The conclusion reached is therefore irresistible that women by the changed conditions of social and industrial life find themselves removed from the duties their mothers performed; they find themselves thrust by conditions, not of their own choosing, into new relations and under new responsibilities.

There are sheltered nooks along the turbulent stream of modern American life where many women still reverently burn