The main purpose of the original Interstate Commerce act, and of the various measures that have been passed to amend it, has been the suppression of unfair railway discrimination. The most pernicious form such discrimination formerly took was that of secret rebating. It is popularly believed, because secret rebating has been almost extirpated, that the suppression of unfair discrimination has become secondary in importance to the prevention of excessive rates. This belief is, to a large extent, unfounded. Its prevalence makes needful emphasizing of the facts that unfair discrimination continues, that it still produces baneful results, and that its suppression and prevention still are, or ought to be, the main object of government regulation of railway traffic. I would not be misunderstood as saying or implying that the condition in respect to railway discrimination is as bad as in years past. On the contrary, there has been a very marked improvement since the Hepburn act went into effect in i906. There never was a time in the history of American railways when there was so little unfair discrimination as there is now. But existing conditions fall short of being what they ought to be. There still are many evil forms of discrimination; and what is worse, many of them under existing laws cannot be stopped or prevented by either the railways or the Interstate Commerce Commission. The railways cannot stop or prevent many of them, because to do so their managers would have to make arrangements which

During recent years there has been much discussion of valuation of the physical properties of railways as a basis for public regulation of their rates. The subject has been moved a good way from the field of academic theory to that of applied theory by the exhaustive physical valuation of the railways of Minnesota, which recently was completed by the railroad commission of that state. There were "physical valuations" before that in Minnesota, notably that in Texas in I894; that in Michigan in i900; and that in Wisconsin in 1903. But the valuation in Texas recently was admitted by the engineer who made it to be entirely out of date; and it never was entitled to much respect. None of these valuations was so exhaustive as that in Minnesota; and those in Michigan and Wisconsin were made as bases for taxation, not rate-regulation. The railroad commission of Washington finished a physical valuation of the railways in that state for purposes of state-regulation at about the same time that the Minnesota commission completed its work. But the valuation in Washington relates to only a few roads, built and operated under somewhat unusual conditions, while the Minnesota valuation relates to nineteen carrying and six switching, or terminal roads, having an aggregate line-mileage of 7,596 miles and an aggregate trackmileage of 10,437 miles, built and operated under physical and commercial conditions similar to those in a large part of the