a profitable business. Let the railroads do likewise. No
company has a right to destroy a rival route, water or rail, by adopting
special tariffs for competing points. There are at points accessible to
water transportation certain freights requiring speedy carriage which
will go to the railroads at profitable rates, but the heavier freights,
as coal, lumber and even certain kinds of grain, should go to the
carrier by water if he can afford to transport them at lower cost.

There have been but few legislative investigations of railroad abuses in
this country, but the disclosures which they have made to the public
are astounding. The most noteworthy of these were made by the Hepburn
committee, of New York, to which reference has already been made. It is
difficult to understand how a free and enlightened community could so
long and so patiently bear railroad despotism. Individual discrimination
might, under the veil of secrecy, long escape notice, but that a system
of open and widespread discrimination affecting every non-competitive
and even many a competitive point in the State, doing visible and
irreparable injury to thousands of shippers, and infringing upon the
rights of millions, should long be borne by a free and enlightened
people, is a strange phenomenon of democratic endurance.

It would lead us too far from our subject to review in detail the many
and glaring instances of local discrimination which the report
enumerates. A few will suffice to show their scope and nature.

William W. Mack, of Rochester, a manufacturer of edged tools, testified
that, in order to save fourteen cents per hundredweight on his freights
to Cincinnati, he shipped his goods to New York and had them shipped
from there to their destination, via Rochester; and that he availed
himself of the same roundabout route for his St. Louis shipments, and
saved thereby eighteen cents per hundredweight. In both of these cases
the railroad company carried the goods 700 miles farther than the direct
distance for a less charge.

Port Jervis millers had their grain shipped from the West to Newburgh, a
point fifty miles to the east of them, and then had it returned to Port
Jervis on the same line, at a less rate than that charged for a direct
shipment.

The grain rates from Chicago to Pittsburgh were 25 cents per hundred in
March, 1878, and only 15 cents from Chicago to New York.

Flour was carried from Milwaukee to New York for 20 cents, while the
r