Knowledge that Transforms

In the last years of the nineteenth century in Virginia the annual state revenue did not exceed $4,000,000, and the amount raised through taxation by the local governments was also small. Taxes per capita were therefore light. It is true that local rates sometimes were high, but low assessments usually neutralized them except for the very scrupulous and the very helpless. The taxation of intangible property, incomes, franchises, and licenses was poorly systematized and worse administered. The chief burden, such as it was, fell on tangible property, and was borne by the landowners. Discontent among the farmers with such a system is readily understood by those who remember the depressed condition of agriculture in the nineties. Particularly were they bitter against the railroads, which were commonly supposed to be evading their taxes by underassessment and other still less creditable methods. Other corporations in the state twenty years ago were relatively few and weak, and the "railroads'" bore the brunt of the farmers' hostility. Sectional inequalities and other forms of injustice were known to exist, but they were given little thought in comparison with the inequalities between the railroad and the landowner. It is needless to say that in a state so largely rural as Virginia the sympathy of the legislature was with the farmers. But

The Pacific Northwest is today passing through a most interesting transition with reference to the question of the methods of shipping grain. To some it may seem a matter of small import whether the grain from Idaho, Washington, and Oregon be shipped in bulk or in sacks. But to the grain farmer of the Northwest the question is vital. Moreover, here is to be found a situation very different in nature from that prevailing in the Middle West, and, incidentally, illustrating how easily conditions alter marketing methods. Thus, in the Middle West the fight was between the line, the independent, and the farmers' elevators; in the Pacific Northwest the fight is between the elevator men and those interested in a continuance of the shipment of grain in sacks. The situation is well worth some study and attention.

The calendar year I914, the last for which complete statistics are available, saw more than 2,500 railroad employees either killed outright or so severely injured that they died within twenty-four hours; while nearly sixty times that number were so injured as not to be able to work for at least three days out of the ten immediately following the accident. Of the accidents giving rise to these injuries, I3,000 were classed as train accidents, in most or all of which damage of some sort was done to the equipment of the road. Damaged engines were hauled into the shops to be repaired, damaged cars likewise, and the cost charged up to operating expenses as a matter of course. But what of the damaged men?