The New Haven Union

OUR ANTI-RAILROAD "VENDETTA."

Last summer the state of Massachusetts by her legislative enactment incorporating the Boston Holding company, receded from her old hostile position against the merger of the Boston and Maine and the New Haven railway interests. At the sacrifice of legal logic Attorney-General Wickersham next withdrew his Federal suit against the merger; and the attorney general of Massachusetts announced in effect his squashing of the suits against letting the New Haven hold some 500 miles of trolley properties in the state. Now comes another retreat with the passage for the state law-makers of a bill specifically allowing the New Haven to hold the Berkshire street railway system—a measure by which the state surrenders the whole principle and policy involved in the original contention.

So ends, practically, a contest of a New England commonwealth against a railway corporation, lasting for some years in its earliest stages rancorous to the last degree, intertwined with state policies, injurious to railway credit, holding up important railway improvements, prolific in legal snarls and fees of eminent attorneys and prolonging a conflict which any body of rational financiers or moderate statesmen could have settled peaceably in a fortnight. But what may almost be called the Massachusetts vendetta against the railway teaches some salutary lessons—that railway controversy cannot be settled by impulse and passion; that a anti-railway litigation of an obstructive character has its limits as well as anti-railway law-making; and that in such controversies the appeal, within proper bounds, to financial interests on the one hand and the public interest in good, railway service on the other, is rarely in vain. The outworking process may be slow, costly and vexatious but it gets there at last. And the rule applies to larger areas of the railway problem than Massachusetts, albeit she supplies so vivid and telling an example.

-Railroad Age Gazette.