“Mr. Davies. Yes; and so can you, if you go around the freight yards.
“Senator Kean. Is this knowledge of yours a guilty knowledge?
“Mr. Davies. I just a moment ago told you not, and further, I will offer to this committee the records of my business.
“Senator Kean. But you say you know these things are being done and have made no complaint.
“Mr. Davies. Haven’t I? I would like to show you these papers that have been nursed by the Interstate Commerce Commission for a year.”
Mr. Prouty of the Interstate Commerce Commission says:[[207]] “I knew some years ago that a train-load of wheat was transported from Minneapolis to Chicago for nothing. There was simply no record of that shipment on the books of the railroad.”
“Senator Cullom. What object had they in doing that?
“Mr. Prouty. They wanted to prefer that man that had the wheat. Instead of paying a rebate they carried the shipment for nothing.”
The power to give or withhold the milling-in-transit privilege is a serious means of discrimination. The Pennsylvania Railroad, for example, grants this privilege to mills west of Pittsburg, but denies it to millers at Harrisburg.[[208]] The Commission decided that the allowance of the privilege of milling-in-transit by a carrier to shippers in one section must be without wrongful prejudice to the rights of shippers in another section served by its line. But the evidence in this case was too meagre and incomplete to enable the Commission to make any order in the premises involving the general extension of milling-in-transit privileges into a territory where such privileges had not been previously allowed.
By refusing to accord the milling-in-transit privilege[[209]] to some when it is granted to others the railroads may crush a mill more effectively than it could be done by a hail storm in which each hailstone weighed a ton. The big Atlantic Flour Mill at Beach and Green Streets, Philadelphia, was rendered useless by the Pennsylvania Railroad’s refusal to extend to it the milling-in-transit privileges enjoyed by other Philadelphia mills.[[210]]