Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SINS OF THE RAILROADS. Having considered the weaknesses and inconsistencies of government regulation, let us now turn to the sins with which the railroads have been charged, both those of omission and commission. The list is too long to include them all, and many of them are not worth discussion. Seven of the most important are chosen, which might be termed the Seven Deadly Sins of the Railroads, viz: Dishonesty, Arrogance, Discrimination, Political Activity, Obstruction of Waterway Improvements, Lack of Foresight, Inefficiency. Dishonesty. Dishonesty in connection with the financial operations of the railroads has been charged and abundantly proven. There is a percentage of it in most humanly conducted affairs, and it appears in all lines of business. The presumption is fair that the percentage of dishonesty is about the same among railroad men as among bankers, insurance men, merchants, manufacturers, miners, farmers and all of the others. The magnitude of the financial operations of railroads is what has drawn the attention of the public to them particularly. It is not the purpose of this article to review the record of crooked railroad finances in detail. The papers have been full of it for many years, sometimes with accurate statements and often with gross exaggerations. The truth itself has been bad enough and needed no exaggeration to make it palatable for the most inveterate scandal-monger. For an account in detail of the sins of the railroads in connection with their financial operations, the reader is referred to "Railroads, Finance and Organization," by Prof. Wm. Z. Ripley. There aresome hundreds of pages in which the financial methods of the railroads are lambasted most unmercifully. His; exposition ;of dishonest methods employed in financing railroads w...