General Manager Van Etten of the B. & A. says discrimination is the American principle. You find it everywhere. You buy goods at wholesale much cheaper than you can get them at retail. It is the same with gas and water and electric light.
A number of railroad men take the view that “railroad service” is a commodity to be sold like any other sort of private property at whatever price the owner can get or chooses to take.
The trouble with these statements (aside from the quantity plea which may be allowed within reasonable limits) is that the differences between railway service and ordinary mercantile service are not taken into account.
If people found they were unfairly treated by the bakeries or groceries or shoe stores of a town, it would be easy to establish a new store co-operatively or otherwise, that would be fair and reasonable, and that possibility keeps the store fair as a rule even where there is no direct competition. But when the railways do not deal justly with the people of a town they cannot build a new road to Chicago or San Francisco. It is the monopoly element, together with the vital and all-pervading influence of transportation, that differentiates the railroad service from any ordinary sort of commerce. If bread stores or shoe stores combined, and, by means of control of raw material or transportation facilities, erected a practical monopoly or group of monopolies, and favoritism were shown in the sale of goods by means of which those who were favored by the monopolists got all the chromos and low rates, and grew prosperous and fat, while those who were not favored went chromoless and grew thin in body and emaciated in purse, it is not improbable that the President would write a message on the bread question and the leather question, and a Senate committee would be considering legislation to alleviate the worst evils of the bread and shoe monopolies without stopping the game entirely.
[347]. In their established tariffs our railroads do apply the same rates per hundred whether the goods moved in carloads or train loads. The Commission has held that the law requires this, and Commissioner Prouty says that the open adoption of any different rule would create an insurrection that Congress would hear from from all parts of the country; but he thinks that in certain cases, live-stock and perishable fruit for example, the railroads should have a right to make lower rates by the train-load than by the carload. In reference to cost of service there is ground for such a difference, but on grounds of public policy is it not a mistake to favor the giant shipper in this way and so help the building of trusts and monopolies?
[348]. Sixth Annual Report, Interstate Commerce Commission, p. 7.
[349]. Outlook, July 1, 1905, p. 577.
[350]. We have seen earlier in this chapter that a number of railroad men and others told the Senate Committee that they believed rebates and discriminations to have ceased. In his excellent book, “The Strategy of Great Railroads,” Mr. Spearman says: “Alexander J. Cassatt has made unjust discrimination in railroad traffic a thing of the past.” Sometimes we are assured: “There can be no doubt but that, on the whole, the freight rates of the country have been adjusted in very nearly the best way possible for the upbuilding of the country’s commerce.” (See “Freight Rates that were made by the Railroads,” W. D. Taylor, Review of Reviews, July, 1905, p. 73.) For one who has in mind the facts brought out in this book, comment on these statements is hardly necessary. There is no doubt that President Cassatt is a railroad commander of exceptional power, but he has not vanquished the smokeless rebate, nor driven the hosts of unjust discrimination from the railroads of the United States.
[351]. Ind. Com. Q. & Ans. iv, p. 596.
[352]. Sen. Com. 1905, p. 1474.