The Government's Suit against the Union Pacific Railroad Company

On February 1st, 1908, a bill was filed in the United States Circuit Court for the District of Utah by the government of the United States, against the Union Pacific, the Southern Pacific, the Northern Pacific, the Great Northern, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe and the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake railroad companies, and several individual defendants, under the Anti-Trust law. The principal defendant is the Union Pacific company, which is charged by the government with controlling or influencing the management of the other defendant corporations, in restraint of competition. The suit was brought at the direct instance of President Roosevelt, who has consistently maintained that the laws of Congress were made to be enforced, and that wealth and power ought never to deter the government from the prosecution of an offender. In 1862 the federal government brought this very railroad into existence by act of Congress, and during the following half dozen years gave it minions of acres of public land and loaned it more than twenty-seven millions of dollars. The company was chartered to build a railroad westward from Omaha to the eastern boundary of California. The whole nation watched it creeping across the plains and through the Rocky Mountains with the intensest interest, and when, on May 10th, 1869, it met the Central Pacific at Ogden and a track was at last open for the movement of trains across the continent, the event was viewed as of the first magnitude for the political and economic welfare of the country.