Railways as Public Agents Author:Brooks Adams 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: RAILWAYS AS PUBLIC AGENTS City Of Spokane Et Al. v. Northern Pacific Railway Et Al. AFTER hearing argument in this cause in Washington, on June 27 and... more » 28, 1907, the Interstate Commerce Commission directed counsel to prepare supplementary briefs upon sundry questions of law, but more particularly upon the legality of the method employed by the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railways in the valuation of their property. These defendants, in order to show the reasonableness of the total revenue drawn by them from the public, valued the entire property employed by the corporations in the public service, and then deducting the cost of operation, taxes, and depreciation from their gross receipts, calculated the balance as a species of rental upon the sum total which their schedules showed. In drawing up their schedules these defendants entered thereon all land to which they claimed title, however acquired, whether by private gift, government grant, condemnation proceedings under eminent domain, or amicable purchase, and whether the land bought was paid forwith money contributed by stockholders from their own funds, or with money appropriated to the purpose out of surplus earnings, after operating expenses, taxes, depreciation, fixed charges, and dividends had been defrayed. The entire acreage thus obtained the defendants caused their own officials to appraise at its supposed present market value, thus charging the "unearned increment" to capital, and it was upon this valuation that the rental the public owed the companies for the use of the land-as a highway was calculated. The chief questions propounded by the Commission for argument related to this method of valuing the defendants' land. The land itself naturally falls into four categories: 1st, Land acquired a...« less