The vigorous fulfillment of the responsibility implied confusion, cross-purposes, and excessive severity, because the powers of a single state were too great within its specific jurisdiction and absolutely negligible beyond.
The railroad companies suffer more from this piecemeal and conflicting regulation than do corporations engaged in manufacturing operations, not only because they discharge a peculiarly public function, but because their business, particularly in its rate-making aspect, suffers severely from any division by arbitrary geographical lines.

But all large inter-state corporations are more or less in the same situation.
Corporations such as the Standard Oil Company and some of the large New York life insurance companies are confronted by the alternative either of going out of business in certain states, or of submitting to restrictions which would compromise the efficiency of their whole business policy.

Doubtless they have not exhausted the evasive and dilatory methods which have served them so well in the past; but little by little the managers of these corporations are coming to realize that they are losing more than they gain from subjection to so many conflicting and supplementary jurisdictions.

Little by little they are coming to realize that the only way in which their businesses can obtain a firm legal standing is by means of Federal recognition and exclusive Federal regulation.

They would like doubtless to continue to escape any effective regulation at all; but without it they cannot obtain effective recognition, and in the existing ferment of public opinion recognition has become more important to them than regulation is dangerous.
Many important financiers and corporation lawyers are still bitterly opposed to any effective centralized regulation, even if accompanied by recognition; but such opposition is not merely inaccessible to the lessons of experience, but is blinded by theoretical prejudice.
Doubtless the position of being, on the one hand, inefficiently regulated by the state governments, and, on the other hand, of being efficiently protected in all their essential rights by the Federal courts--doubtless such a situation seems very attractive to men who need a very free hand for the accomplishment of their business purposes; but they should be able to understand that it would necessarily produce endless friction.