“No, I guess not.”

To another railroad man of wide experience in inter-railway contracts, I said: “Can any pool prevent the owners of big concerns in oil, beef, grain, steel, etc., from getting special advantages, or abolish discrimination in the supply of cars, quickness of carriage, division of rates, classification, long and short haul, passes, political favors, and other forms of favoritism originating in causes independent of competition among the railroads?”

“No, of course it cannot,” he replied.

Such questions never fail to bring an admission that pooling cannot be relied on for the whole of the work to be done in this field. In fact only one of the six motives for discrimination[[387]] arises from the competitive conditions that pooling is expected to remove. Combined roads will make discriminative rates to create new business, to solidify traffic, to favor places or concerns in which they are interested, to favor persons of large influence who may aid or injure railroad interests, or to injure persons or places that have incurred their displeasure. All but 2 of the 64 methods of discrimination above enumerated would find a use under a pooling system or even if combination were complete and competition entirely done away with, as the reader may see for himself by running over the list on pages 229–232.

Even competitive discrimination is not eliminated by pooling, for the railroads will not stick to the pool. A railroad president has been known to go from the room in which he had agreed with other railroad potentates to pool their business and maintain rates, and hunt up at once a big shipper, offer him a cut rate, and get a contract taking the whole of his business away from the other roads.

Albert Fink, the greatest traffic association organizer we have had, complained bitterly that rates agreed upon in a convention were frequently cut before the convention had dispersed.[[388]] President Tuttle of the Boston and Maine says: “I never knew a pooling arrangement that prevented competition or was wholly satisfactory. There was never what was considered an equitable distribution of traffic to anybody, because the strong lines that could control and handle 50 percent of the traffic were always struggling against parting with any of that 50 percent, while the weak, 10 percent road was always trying to get 15 percent.”

The man who drew the first pooling contract made in this country and has drawn many since says that pooling will not stop even competitive discrimination, because the roads will slash rates on the sly to get business. In other words pooling does not eliminate the struggle for traffic. Company A has 25 percent of the pool money between certain points. It cuts rates on the quiet and gets 30 or 35 percent of the business, and then says: “Gentlemen, I’m carrying 35 percent of the traffic and I want more of the pool money.” The gentleman just mentioned told me that this sort of thing had been done in every case of pooling with which he was acquainted.

Sometimes the break in the rates is known to the Association but assented to or tolerated because it is clear that a break is bound to occur anyway, and may be enlarged rather than diminished by resistance. Some years ago when Chauncey Depew was president of the New York Central system, he said: “Large shippers arbitrarily transfer the whole of their business from one line to another. That leaves a weak line denuded of its business.

“A weak line is a line which is dependent largely upon through traffic and which has not much local business. These great shippers who control anywhere from ten to twenty-five cars a day will take all their business off this weak line and put it on the strongest line, which already has all it can do.

“Then the weak line is in trouble, and it comes to these shippers and says: ‘Well, how can we get you back?’ The shippers say: ‘You can only get us back by giving us five or ten cents a hundred off from the tariff.’ The weak line invariably does it.”