Universality of the rate of growth of all hadron-nucleon total cross sections in the range 10 to 1500 GeV/c

The energy dependence of total cross section of hadron-nucleon collisions has been studied in terms of two components: the first component decreases with increasing energy of the incident hadron whereas the second component increases like ln s. The coefficient of ln s is found to be the same within 5% for p^±p, π^±p and K^±p collisions. The rate of growth of the rising component i.e., dσ /d(ln,s), of inelastic cross sections, deduced from σ_tot and σ_el, of pp and πp are found to be the same within 1.5 standard deviations; an attempt has been made to understand this near equality from factorization of the pomeron.