several clauses of the interstate act read to him; but when a rich
shipper wants a pass, why he gets it at once."

From years of ineffectual efforts on the part of State and national
legislatures and commissions to regulate the rate business, it would
appear that the only remedy is national ownership, which would place
the rate-making power in one body with no inducement to act otherwise
than fairly and impartially, and this would simplify the whole
business and relegate an army of traffic managers, general freight
agents, soliciting agents, brokers, scalpers, and hordes of traffic
association officials to more useful callings while relieving the
honest user of the railway of intolerable burthens.

Under corporate control, railways and their officials have taken
possession of the majority of the mines which furnish the fuel so
necessary to domestic and industrial life, and there are but few
coalfields where they do not fix the price at which so essential an
article shall be sold, and the whole nation is thus forced to pay
undue tribute.

Controlling rates and the distribution of cars, railway officials have
driven nearly all the mine owners who have not railways or railway
officials for partners, to the wall. For instance, in Eastern Kansas,
on the line of the St. Louis & San Francisco Railway Company, were two
coal companies, whose plants were of about equal capacity, and several
individual shippers. The railway company and its officials became
interested in one of the coal companies, and such company was, by the
rebate and other processes, given rates which averaged but forty per
cent. of the rates charged other shippers, the result being that all
the other shippers were driven out of the business, a part of them
being hopelessly ruined before giving up the struggle. In addition to
gross discriminations in rates this railway company practised worse
discriminations in the distribution of cars; for instance, during one
period of five hundred and sixty-four days, as was proven in court,
they delivered to the Pittsburg Coal Company, 2,371 empty cars to be
loaded with coal, although such company had sale for, and capacity to
produce and load, during the same period, more than 15,000 cars.
During the same time this railway company delivered to the Rogers Coal
Company, in which the railway company and C. W. Rogers, its
vice-president and general manager, were interested, no less than
15,483 coal cars, while four hundred a