or of having his importance diminished. The Sultan presides over the State Council, on which sit the more important native rulers and some Chinese; and there he deals with all legislation, appoints native headmen, and settles their allowances. So far as is possible, all the lower grades of the civil service are filled by Malays. In fact, the detailed work of administration is almost entirely performed by them; and even on the bench there are not a few native judges who have learned from the British how to deal fairly between man and man.

There was one sphere of Malay life in which the British Residents pledged themselves by treaty not to interfere. The Mohammedan religion and all its rites and observances were left untouched. For the rest, habits and manners and customs were changed, when they were changed at all, only with infinite caution. Much that was opposed to Western instincts was allowed to remain as it was; public gamblinghouses even to-day being under government protection. There was no cataclysmal stroke of reform; but from time to time the better way was pointed out, and the Malays were urged gently along it. Civilization advanced evenly and almost imperceptibly, and the ground was patiently prepared beforehand. The English realized that the limits within which it is wise, or even possible, to Occidentalize the Orient are of disappointing rigidity.

It will certainly be necessary, though perhaps a little painful, for Americans also to realize it. You may have a good deal too much of "the principles of 1776" in the government of Asiatics, and the results in such cases are not satisfactory. There is a terrible temptation in the notion of "spreading the American idea," and bestowing juries and a free press and elected legislatures and all the rest of the paraphernalia on the benighted Filipinos. The English have felt the same sort of temptation in India; and wherever they have succumbed, both they and their subjects have been the worse for it. The Malay Peninsula is a golden object-lesson in the value of "going slow." Gladstonianism in the tropics is altogether as out of place and as harmful as "Jeffersonian doctrines." The English in Malaya took the better course when, dropping all prejudices in favor of this political theory or of that, they looked the facts squarely in the face and considered how they might be bettered. And the defective altruism that would explode "democracy" upon the Orient is, as it seems to onlookers, one of the gravest dangers that lies ahead of the American venture in the Philippines.

In this as in other matters the English rulers of the Peninsula have shown an admirable dispassionateness. The wealth of the Peninsula,

for instance, lies in its deposits of tin, which the Malays are far too inert to work. The British Residents at once made it their business to attract the Chinese and Indian coolies, through whose labor and capital it has come about that five-sixths of the world's supply of tin is shipped from the Peninsula, and that a small export duty on the mineral raises threequarters of the state's revenue. Americans, perhaps, have acted similarly, but it is to be noticed that they have already restricted Chinese immigration into Hawaii, for no other reason than that they object to Chinamen at San Francisco; and there would seem to be a chance that their prejudices may before long stretch across the remainder of the Pacific to the Philippine Archipelago. It is not, therefore, inappropriate to point out how ably British rule in the Malay Peninsula has exemplified the two pivotal principles that should regulate the government of an Eastern dependency by a Western people. The one principle recognizes that, after all, the East is the East and requires a large dose of Eastern treatment; while the other lays it down that a dependency should be administered in the interests of those who live in it rather than of those who own it. SYDNEY BROOKS.

THE AMENDMENT OF THE INTERSTATE COMMERCE

ACT AND RAILROAD POOLING.

THE bill recently introduced in Congress for the amendment of the Interstate Commerce Act is a reminder that it is now fifteen years since our Federal Government entered upon the novel and far-reaching programme of the regulation of the movement of interstate freight upon the railroads of the country. That the act has proved a failure and should be amended is largely conceded; but there is much diversity of opinion as to the lines on which new legislation should proceed. Two widely different plans are advocated. The first may be described as favoring the enlargement of the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission, so as to allow it to fix maximum and minimum freight rates, which shall be binding on the railroads unless the Federal courts interpose through their powers of injunction. There is to be no toleration of pooling, and no place for traffic agreements or freight associations, such as were declared illegal by the Supreme Court in the Trans-Missouri Freight Association and Joint Traffic Association cases. In other words, the policy to be pursued is that of enforced competition, coupled with active governmental supervision and control.

The second plan is based on a wholly different conception. It contemplates a full legal recognition of pooling or other form of traffic agreement as an indispensable basis for anything like steadiness in rates and the abolition of secret rate-cutting. It also seeks to have the Interstate Commerce Commission relieved of some of its inconsistent and conflicting duties, and placed on a more intelligible and practical footing. It is based on the belief that the railroads of the country are in a state of progressive development, which of itself, when unhindered by legislation, tends to a correction of many of the evils now existing. Its policy is to bring traffic conditions into harmony with ascertained economic laws, using legislation only so far as may be necessary to make good deficiencies at certain points where those laws fail to operate. It relies on an evolutionary process of natural adjustment more than on the active intervention of the state.

At the time of its passage, the Interstate Commerce Act was well understood to be an experiment, and the Supreme Court has since so characterized it. More than this, it was a compromise. Indeed, as much may be said of a large part of the English and American legislation of the present day. The success or failure of a law depends to a great degree upon the nature and extent of the compromise of which it is the embodiment. Compromises in legislation may be roughly divided into two classes. The first embraces those in which the sacrifices made, or the concessions granted, though perhaps neither trifling nor unimportant, are, nevertheless, of such a character as not to violate the principle on which the act is based, but leave its general outline and structure reasonably harmonious and consistent. The second class includes measures where there is a positive abandonment of fundamental rules and a reckless commingling of hostile and irreconcilable principles, so that the whole forms a hodge-podge of impracticable theories and unworkable details. Of the first class, our national Constitution is a shining example; to the second belongs the Interstate Commerce Act of February 4, 1887.

That it has brought disappointment to shippers and disgust to railroad managers, both its friends and enemies are agreed. Framed to prevent discrimination in rates, it was based on the following equitable principles: That all railroad charges should be reasonable and just; that no unjust discriminations by means of special rates or drawbacks should be permitted; and that no unreasonable tariff preferences should be accorded to any person or locality. Of its fatal defects, only two need now be dwelt upon: (1) its prohibition of pooling and other like forms of traffic agreement; and (2) the anomalous and contradictory character impressed upon the Interstate Commerce Commission.

The anti-pooling clauses contained in Section 5 can only be explained as a concession to the most lamentable ignorance and prejudice. The original Senate bill contained a clause which showed clearly that no prohibition of pooling was contemplated. It read as follows:

The said Commission shall especially inquire into that method of railway management or combination known as pooling, and shall report to Congress what, if any, legislation is advisable and expedient upon that subject.

Unfortunately, this clause disappeared before the bill was laid on President Cleveland's desk for signature, and the prohibitory Section. 5 took its place. The result has been deplorable. The railroads have found themselves expected to comply with regulations directly contradictory in tenor and effect. Competition was enjoined upon them as

the law of their being; but in the same breath they were bidden to beware of that discrimination in rates which is the very essence and life-blood of competition, and without which no practicable form of competition has ever been maintained. Had such unreasonable provisions been suggested for any other branch of industry, they would have been laughed to scorn. Were a bill to be presented which should forbid the great department stores of New York, Boston, and Chicago to make any difference in their prices for the same kind of articles, and at the same time should prohibit the managers of those stores from coming to any understanding among themselves as to what prices they should fix and maintain for their infinitely varied assortments of merchandise, it would instantly be stigmatized as not only grossly unjust, but absolutely impossible of fulfilment.

Yet this would not be very different from what was adopted in 1887 as a law for the government of the greatest railroad system in the world.1

An eminent railroad lawyer, himself once a member of the Interstate Commerce Commission, has observed of this attempted prevention of discrimination: "The result was prohibited, while the cause was left in full operation." Again, "It was proposed to stamp out the disease by force, but at the same time to stimulate the miasma which was its cause."" Or, as the Commission itself remarked on page 16 of its annual report for 1898, the act "endeavored to eradicate the results, and to perpetuate the cause." That a statute framed avowedly to prevent discrimination in rates should have deliberately forbidden the only method ever devised for that purpose that worked with any degree of success would have been ludicrous if its results had not been so serious. No wonder that discrimination has been more active than ever, so that the Commission in the eleventh year of its existence should have felt obliged to say:

We are satisfied that a large part of the business at the present time is transacted upon illegal rates. Indeed, so general has this rule become that in certain quarters the exaction of the published rate is the exception. From this, two things naturally and frequently result. First, gross discriminations between individuals and gross preferences between localities; and these discriminations and preferences are almost always in favor of the strong and against the weak.

The Commission itself is, by the terms of the act, saddled with duties quite as inconsistent as those imposed upon the railroad companies.

'The railroad mileage of the United States may be taken as about 190,000 miles, against 129,000 fifteen years ago. The freight annually carried exceeds 922,000,000 tons. The mileage of the world appears to be about 442,000.

Mr. A. F. Walker, in THE FORUM, 1891, pp. 526-27.

3 Rep. I. C. Com., 1898, p. 18.